Pretty Poison
by Thescarredman
Summary: Michael takes on a missing-persons job for for a client who's more than he appears. Then again, so are the people he's looking for.
1. International Man of Mystery

_My name is Michael Westen. I used to be a covert operative, a secret agent, an intelligence officer…._

_No. There's already enough duplicity in my life. I used to be a spy, until…_

_Well, until someone decided they had a better use for me. I was pried loose from government service with a setup, a carefully doctored paper trail that made it look like I'd gone rogue. It happens, way too often, and it was totally believable to people who practice suspicion as a professional virtue. I was 'burned', spy-talk for word being put out to every covert agency on the planet that my motives and actions had become suspect and I no longer had the trust – and protection – of my former employers. When the 'burn notice' went out, I was unmasked and repudiated at the touchiest part of an undercover op involving some very bad people. The result was immediate and unpleasant._

_Beaten and unconscious, I was delivered to Miami, my boyhood hometown, and dumped. All my resources evaporated: bank accounts, credit lines, contacts, cover identities. Spies don't have any authentic credit or employment history, of course, which meant I officially ceased to exist, except for prominent entries on several government watch lists. Unable to work or travel, I was expected, I suppose, to live with my mother until I was desperate enough to take the next 'professional' job I was offered, even if it came from the people who'd set me up._

_In adverse situations, I've always tried to do the thing unexpected. It keeps me alive and free._

_*_

"This is the big one, Mike." Barry the money launderer slurped his cocktail as if in dire need of it. "A job like this could put you on top. Really."

"Being 'on top' doesn't exactly appeal, Barry." Michael scanned his surroundings from behind his sunglasses. "Sometimes it just means you're the one who's got the farthest to fall."

Barry was part of the meager network of contacts Michael had salvaged from his former life. They traded information, and occasionally found work for each other. Barry had called him to meet with a prospective client, long on promise and short on details in a way that made him a little suspicious. But he'd agreed, after taking a few basic precautions.

They were sitting on opposite sides of a roomy four-place table at a patio bar overlooking the hotel landscaping and the beach beyond. Awnings stretched overhead, providing shade, but otherwise all but one side of the establishment were open to the elements. There was a wealth of observation points and routes in and out. It was just the sort of place Michael would have picked for a first meet with someone he wasn't sure about. Only, the client had selected it. The display of fieldcraft sparked Michael's interest as it ramped up his unease. He hoped Sam had found a good vantage point; he wanted pictures of this guy. "What do you know about him?"

Barry turned his glass and stared into it. "I know he's rich and well-connected, new in town, and looking for talent. He must have done some research, because he specifically asked if Michael Westen was available." Barry gave him an odd little smile that looked more like gas pains than amusement. "Seems you got a fan."

Michael studied his tablemate until Barry began to fidget, then said, "Barry, do we have company at the table?"

The man stopped fidgeting. "I'm not wearing a wire, Mike, honest. It's just… Big money or not, I think maybe I should have told him you were too busy, or I couldn't find you. But I was scared to. The guy comes with first-rate cred, but he creeps me…" He looked up over Michael's shoulder and fell silent.

"Gentlemen." A deep gravelly voice. A man stood between them on Michael's right: late forties maybe, dark hair in a widow's peak. Sunglasses hid his eyes. A strange scar that started at his forehead, disappeared under his left lens, and reappeared on his cheek made Michael wonder if the man had two good ones. Six feet, six-one, one-seventy to one hundred ninety pounds, fit and muscular. Dressed conservatively in a light polo shirt and slacks whose cut and fabric revealed wealth and taste to a discerning eye without being showy. No jewelry, and his wristwatch was a battered old military-style timepiece with a leather strap. "I'm a few minutes early, I know, but apparently none of us likes being late for appointments."

He sat without offering a hand. More fieldcraft, Michael thought. No need to advertise that this was a meet, or anything but some buds getting together for a drink.

Barry got up and looked at them both. "Luck, Mike." He left without looking back.

The prospect reached for Barry's empty glass and pulled it to him, keeping his hand curled around it and the other resting casually on the table. Michael speculated what sort of man considered keeping his hands in sight while dealing with strangers an act of politeness.

_The kind of man who frightens people who know who he is._

The man watched Barry disappear. "He didn't tell you he was leaving, I take it."

"I think he was about to. He didn't tell me what this was about, either, Mr.…" He let it hang.

"Lynch. John Lynch." The shade-covered eyes turned his way. "It was my stipulation that we talk alone. If you take the job and need to bring him in, I have no objection, but I'm sure you're a respecter of need-to-know."

Michael slid his chair back a little farther, putting most of his body in Lynch's view while making it easier to stand. "What's the job?"

"Missing persons. A young man and woman." The corners of Lynch's mouth lifted slightly. "They weren't when I saw them last, but I'd guess they're a couple by now."

"The police handle missing persons cases."

"They won't handle this one."

_Witness Protection Program?_ Michael had once been duped into bird-dogging a man on the run for a contract killer. Feeling his unease ratchet up another notch, he asked, "What makes you think they're in Miami?"

"Because I sent them here."

Fiona appeared at Michael's elbow. He felt his cheeks stretching in the grin he wore when he was thinking of throttling someone. "Fi. I didn't expect to see you here." _I expected you to stay in the lobby of the hotel, listening to the wire I'm wearing._

Lynch was sizing her up, but not the way men usually did. Michael was sure the older man knew exactly what he was looking at. "One of your crew, I'm sure. Won't you sit down, Miss?"

Fiona looked at Lynch as if she was sighting on him through a scope. "Don't mind if I do." She sat facing Lynch, at Michael's left hand, setting her fanny purse on the table in front of her, and set her hand on it. Lynch casually pushed back his chair and dropped his hands off the table.

Michael said quickly,"Mr. Lynch, if you sent them here, why don't you know where they are?"

Lynch shifted, and the charge building between him and Michael's trigger-happy sweetheart grounded out a little. "Because they're hiding, and at the time, I thought it best to know as little of the details as possible. But the situation has changed, and I need to at least get in touch and talk to them. I've already spoken with the man I hired to set them up here. He won't tell me where to find them, or deliver a message, or even admit he knows where they are." The undamaged cheek, the right, lifted briefly. "Can't fault him for his professionalism."

Michael felt very close to refusing the deal; there were too many unanswered questions here for his comfort. "The contact. What's his name?"

"Dominic Corteza. He has a legitimate business, a cigar factory in little Havana. But he makes his real money doing special jobs for people, and does no small amount of pro bono work as well. Rather like you, Mr. Westen."

Fiona spoke up, surprising Michael again. "I'm surprised you haven't found a way around one stubborn man, Mr. Lynch." Her eyes were still locked on the man's face.

Michael shifted. "Fi, do you know each other?"

Her hand still rested on her purse, which he knew contained a Browning Hi-Power. "Only by reputation."

"Thought I caught a hint of County Armagh in your voice," Lynch said. "IRA or Provos?"

"What's the difference?"

"It might give me a better idea what you're carrying in your purse, is all." A pause. "You're too young to remember."

"You were a favorite story of my Uncle Kev's." Fi's fingers toyed with the zip of her bag. "He always wanted to meet you."

A sudden motion a step away startled Michael and made Fi's hand jump off her purse. A girl appeared at Lynch's shoulder. Michael immediately revised his first guess about her age: she'd looked no older than sixteen at first, but he decided that was just her tiny size and slight frame. She was twenty or so, and had the delicate form and porcelain skin that Japanese women have an undeserved reputation for. But her slightly slanted eyes were gray-blue, and her boyishly short hair a very light blonde with no sign of darker roots. She was dressed in a pair of tight khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt tied off at the midriff, and wore a fanny pack and an expensive camera with a very long lens on a strap around her neck. "Sorry I'm late. Had a little cleaning up to do. Did I miss anything?"

Fi recovered and said, "What's this? Bring-your-daughter-to-work day?"

"Funny." The girl regarded Fiona with the same sniper's gaze Fi had been giving Lynch. "She's funny, isn't she, Jack?" She set the camera on the table at the empty place across from Michael, but she didn't sit. She stood behind Lynch's right shoulder, scanning the area. It occurred to Michael that, if the two of them were armed and right-handed, it would be a perfect fire-support position, both of them able to draw and shoot in any direction without getting in each other's way. He decided that Lynch couldn't be carrying anything bigger than a holdout gun in an ankle holster, and the girl's outfit had no hiding places at all, though her fanny pack could hold a lot of hurt.

"Anna," Lynch said, amused, "Keep your claws in."

Then Michael recognized the camera. He looked up at the girl, trying to keep his voice casual and stifle his alarm. "What did you do to him?"

"He's yours too, then?" Her eyes left Fi to settle on Michael for a moment. "Nothing permanent. He may have trouble getting out of bed tomorrow. Now he's made, will he join us, do you think?"

A waiter put in a belated appearance. "You folks ready?"

"Carta Blanca," Michael said, thinking the long-necked bottle might come in handy as a weapon.

"Just water, thank you," the little pixie said, sizing up the waiter in a way that pulled a smile from him. But Michael saw where her eyes lingered, and even though she smiled, he knew her scrutiny had more to do with threat assessment than mating ritual.

"On me," Lynch said. "Mentirita. Cuba Libre, I mean, if they have limes. Otherwise, just rum and Coke, easy on the rum. Your friend who lost his camera, will he want something?"

Michael flicked a glance at Fiona, who was still splitting her attention between their host and his unlikely bodyguard. "He's partial to mojitos."

"Two for him, then. You, miss?"

Fiona leaned back, trying without success to look casual. "Nothing for me, thank you."

Lynch nodded as if he'd expected her to decline to drink with him, and sent the waiter off. Then he raised his hand in a small gesture, and the girl Anna unzipped her pack. Michael tensed and Fi sat forward, but the girl only removed a small envelope and passed it to the older man.

Lynch slid the envelope to Michael. "Pictures of the kids, and cash. Not payment or a retainer, just a consulting fee. If you don't want the job, take the money and keep quiet about it. The pictures are three years old, but they're the most recent I have. Don't show them around. It could be worth those kids' lives for the wrong person to know I'm looking for them here."

Sam entered the bar and looked around briefly before he approached the table. He looked a bit rough, Michael thought. He was limping, and his shoulder and neck seemed stiff. The little blonde turned to him, placing her hand lightly on Lynch's shoulder. "Sorry about that. Jack has bad people looking for him everywhere."

"Not if you find them first, I bet." Sam eased into the empty seat with a wince and stared at his camera. "You didn't do anything to it?"

"It's a nice camera. Besides, if you got any pictures, I might want a copy." She moved around behind Sam and looked over him at Lynch. "That's a new look for you. I kind of like it." She pressed the heel of her small hand between Sam's shoulder blades and moved it in a small circle. "There, about?"

Sam grunted. "Uhh. Yeah. You charge by the hour?"

"It never takes that long." She smiled and slipped the other arm around his shoulder, resting her forearm on his collarbone. With her cheek brushing his ear, she said, "On the count of three. One-"

Her forearm yanked back, and the hand between his shoulder blades rammed forward. Sam's back arched and his eyes opened wide as they all heard a muffled pop. She returned to her position behind Lynch. "Better?"

Sam twisted his head experimentally and rolled his shoulder. "_Gone. _Wow."

"You'll still be sore tomorrow." She started scanning the surroundings again. "But your first dose of painkiller's here."

The waiter arrived with a tray of drinks. Lynch reached back for his wallet as they were being distributed and removed a card, which he handed over. Michael and his two associates traded glances; the featureless rectangle of black plastic was exclusive to millionaires with plenty of cash on hand.

When the server left, Lynch went on. "There's a card with a number in the envelope. If you locate them, just give them the card and tell them I'm looking for them."

"That's all?"

The scarred man gave a small shrug. "I think they'll want to talk to me, but I can't be certain. You'll have earned your pay, regardless." He sipped his drink and smiled at the quartered limes packed down with ice. "_Excelente_."

"We haven't talked money yet."

"It'll be a short talk. I hire the best, and I expect to pay accordingly. But you haven't told me if you'll work for me." Lynch gave Fi a glance over the rim of his glass. "I'm sure you'll want to talk that over. Just remember that this isn't about me, it's about two kids in trouble. Whether you take the job or not, we won't be meeting again." He took another sip. "I haven't been to Miami in a long time, but I'm sure I've been noticed. That means I'll have to behave like I'm here on business. I'll be expected to renew old acquaintanceships and act like I'm putting something together. On the other hand, I can't afford to stay in one place long."

"No," Fiona said, "or go anyplace you're expected, I imagine. Or sleep twice in the same bed."

Sam's half-empty drink paused on its way to his mouth, and he glanced across the table at Michael. Michael pretended not to notice.

Anna, the little blonde at Lynch's shoulder, sipped her water, looking at Fi with lowered lashes. "Jack needn't be unduly worried. He's been taking care of little annoyances on his own for a long time, and now he's got me besides. But while he's on the move, he'll be pulling eyes away from the kids and anyone else who's looking for them."

Completely un-intimidated, Fi addressed Lynch. "What are these people to you?"

Michael had expected the man to tell her she wasn't getting paid to know, or some such. Instead, he watched the corners of Lynch's mouth turn down. "Family of friends. Friends of family. An obligation I took up, and it's time to make another payment on it." He stood abruptly. "Stay. Whatever you want, it's on my tab. Good meeting you all."

The little blonde stayed behind a moment while her principal put a few people between him and the table, her eyes patrolling his six and lingering on Fi. Then she turned and headed out. Fiona's eyes tracked her out of sight.

"Fi," Michael said in warning tones.

"Just checking to see if she casts a shadow in sunlight."

Sam deposited his empty glass and picked up the full one. "A client with money, and a big spender too. That'd be a switch. Who is he, Mikey?"

"He says his name is John Lynch."

Rum and water sprayed out Sam's nose. As he coughed and sputtered, Michael asked, "Will somebody tell me who this guy is?"

"Don't deal with him, Michael," Fiona said. "He's the Devil himself."

9


	2. The View From the Ground

_A spy lives a life of deception. You misrepresent yourself to strangers to gain their trust so you can abuse it. You befriend people who make your skin crawl. You train to stay emotionally detached, so that every reaction and every display of emotion is calculated, a move in the game, because giving anything away at the wrong moment can mean your mission or your life._

_You practice a sort of self-deception, too. Role immersion requires you to put as much of the real you as possible into your persona to keep it genuine and believable. But you run the risk of losing yourself in your role and forgetting where your sympathies lie. That's how undercover cops turn into criminals and spies earn burn notices – real ones._

_Spying is lonely. The people you deal with are suspicious and dangerous; your chain of command is looking over your shoulder to pounce on you if you screw it up. Relationships with your peers are usually fleeting, shifting with the winds of politics. Love is impossible to nurture._

_Undeserved trust can be a fatal mistake. But trust is the grease that keeps the machinery running and keeps people sane. Sometimes, after you've examined a situation from every angle and eliminated all the what-ifs that you can, you just have to shuck it all, roll the dice, and trust someone._

Lynch and his companion left the patio bar and walked no more than a hundred yards to the next hotel on the beach strip. They entered an empty elevator, and Lynch pressed the button for a floor near the top of the structure. As the car rose, he said, "Well, doll? What do you think?"

"I think he's your man, and he's considering your offer. But the odds he'll take it drop from fifty percent to less than ten once the girl tells him what she thinks she knows."

"Dammit. I knew his girlfriend was an IRA expat, but I didn't think she'd know about Newtown. I should have remembered what a family business the Army is. Some of them are third- and fourth-generation."

The car reached their floor, and the doors opened. Lynch placed a hand on the jamb to let Anna exit ahead of him, then followed. He glanced up and down the empty hall before he spoke again. "She doesn't know the real story, of course, but the version she knows is damning enough."

"Maybe I could handle it. Pay Mr. Corteza a visit," she offered.

"No. I gave those kids into his keeping. I'm not going to reward him for a good job by turning you loose on him."

They walked to the end of the hall, Anna leading, their steps vanishing into the thick carpet. The doors were widely separated, indicating the size of the suites behind them. "Jack, what if he won't help you because he _can't_? What if the kids have skipped?"

"Then I think he'd tell me."

"Not if he's the reason... what if he did something?"

"Dominic Corteza's an honest coyote. He treated them right."

They reached the door at the end of the hall, and the little blonde slowed, spreading a palm towards him in a halting gesture. She examined the doorknob and the floor in front of the door. "Jack," she said in a low voice, "did you order room service, or housekeeping?"

"No. What is it?"

"One man and a cart have been in and out within the last thirty minutes. He spent about ten minutes in the room."

"Well, I did order something, but it shouldn't have taken a cart to deliver. Or ten minutes."

She unlocked the door and swung it open cautiously, motioning him back. She scanned the room from the doorway and gave a quick little gasp. "Oh, Jack."

The sitting room's tables were bedecked with floral arrangements, as colorful as an Impressionist painting. One of them included an ivy-like plant that cascaded off the butler's table behind the couch down to the floor. The air of the suite was heady with fragrance.

Lynch slipped an arm around her. "Hm. Didn't realize I'd ordered so much. I thought you might be missing your garden. Like it?"

"You need to ask?" She turned quickly and stood on tiptoe to kiss his chin. Then she slipped out of his arm and entered the room, leaving him to follow and shut the door. She bent her face to a huge white flower in its own vase. "What does it smell like?"

Lynch's eyebrows lifted. "You could give me a complete analysis of the perfume, and a saturation level in parts per million."

"To you, I mean." She pulled the blossom from its vase and brushed it across her lips, eyes closing softly. "What does it make you think of when you fill your nose with it and go, 'Ahh'?"

"The scent makes me think of you." The eyebrow on his good side, the right, twitched. "Then again, so does the smell of laundry detergent."

She slapped his chest lightly with her free hand and left it there, palm flat over his heart.

He cupped her elbow in his hand. "And the feel of it is just like you. Not your skin, you. Cool and firm at first, but it warms in my hand and turns soft and yielding. Fair and fragrant and succulent, a treat for all the senses."

"If only I could blush." She lifted his sunglasses off his face, exposing the rest of his facial gouges where they crossed the blind white marble of scar tissue that was his left eye. "What a treasure you are, and all mine. Who else on earth knows the soul of a poet is hidden behind that face?"

He scoffed. "You think you're the first girl I've used that line on?"

"Yes." Her hand returned to his chest. "Why do you bother lying? I always know."

"It's still fun to try." His hand left her elbow and circled her wrist near his chest.

She looked up at him through her lashes. "Do you want your thank-you now or later?"

"Both." He removed her hand. "But I can't be late for the next meet." He pulled his shirt out of his slacks and turned towards the master bedroom. "I'm headed for the shower. _Don't _follow me in."

She did, but only watched when he paused at the bed and pulled his shirt over his head, exposing a muscular torso peppered with scars from neck to waist. They were particularly heavy on his left front between collarbone and navel, looking as if John Lynch had received half a dozen shotgun loads in that spot. Anyone seeing them would wonder how the man had survived the event that had put them there.

He tossed the shirt on the bed and sat to remove shoes and socks. "I'll never understand your kinky fascination with scar tissue."

"We've been through all that. I can't self-repair. From my point of view, every mark on you is an upraised middle finger to entropy. It's as weirdly fascinating as the way all those little hairs rise up when I blow in your ear." As he stood again and unbuttoned his pants, she took a step nearer. "Or that other thing, when I…"

He raised a palm. "Stop." He pointed to the bed. "Sit. Stay."

She sat primly on the edge of the bed, feet together, hands clasped in lap, eyes downcast. "Arf."

Lynch barked a laugh. "Stop it. I just need to get out of here on time, is all." He tossed pants and underwear on the bed and padded to the shower wearing only his watch. He didn't close the bathroom door. He pulled the shower's frosted slider closed and started the water. "And I'm not sure when I'll be back. All these people keep late hours. Most of them are still lingering over breakfast right now."

"Why not take me with you?"

"IO's bound to learn I'm here soon. They don't need to know you're with me. I'll be fine, as long as I keep moving and don't go someplace I'm expected, as Miss Fi says."

"Then why are you keeping an _appointment_?"

"I misspoke. I just know where this guy's going to be at a certain time. I'm dropping in for a visit."

She stood. "I'll lay out your clothes, save you some time. The usual, Johnny Cash?"

"That's fine. Keep it casual, not business." Splashing noises indicated he was turning under the water.

She selected a black silk button-front shirt and black slacks from the closet and laid them on the bed. She opened a drawer and tossed a pair of black socks on the coverlet. "Boxers, or go commando?"

"Why in God's name would I want to go commando?"

"Might save me ten seconds later. Fine, then." She added black silk boxers to the ensemble and set black leather loafers at the foot of the bed. "Jacket?"

"It's eighty degrees outside."

She pulled open another drawer and rested her hand on the black nylon shoulder holster holding Lynch's Smith and Wesson. "How are you going to hide your gun, then?"

"I won't need it. In fact, wearing it would cost me cred where I'm going. An air of confidence will be much better protection than eleven rounds of forty-caliber."

The water shut off. The door slid open. He reached for the towel a second too late as Anna sprinted into the bathroom and snatched it off the bar. "Hey!"

She draped it across her front with one hand and undid the knot at the base of her shirt underneath with the other. "Come and get it."

He reached through the open shower door, palm up, waiting.

"Oh, _fine_, then." She dropped the end of the towel in his hand, but still held it to her. "Five minutes?" She asked hopefully.

He let go of the towel and took her chin between thumb and forefinger. "Five days, as soon as we're done here. You pick the place."

"Bed," she said firmly.

"There are beds everywhere."

"Shouldn't take long to get there, then." She handed him the towel and stepped back. "But I hope that doesn't mean you expect me to hide in here the whole time you're gone."

He started toweling his hair. "Not even in your beautiful substitute garden?"

She folded her arms. "Hmp. I'll never take a gift from you at face value again." She turned and marched back through the bathroom and bedroom.

"I'll call when I get a chance," he called after her.

"Call my cell, not the room. I think I'll go out and find a handsome man to entertain me tonight. A handsome _older_ man."

"Shouldn't have to leave the hotel for that," he rejoined. "The lobby and bar are probably swarming with conventioneers looking for strange. Just make sure he takes you to _his_ room."

She didn't answer, letting him think he'd won his point. She returned to the flower-strewn sitting room and sat, letting him dress alone in the bedroom. Her lips curved in a Mona Lisa smile as she murmured, "What sort of secret agent engraves his name and number on his camera, I wonder?"

Sam Axe was a man whose life was in a state of transition.

He'd joined the FBI in his late twenties after a stint in the SEALs, a young idealist like many others who boarded the bus to Quantico to bring down the bad guys and bring justice to America. His first three years, he'd accepted the scut work heaped on any new agent by more senior men, and dispatched it handily and asked for more. He'd stoically endured the hazing that was de rigueur for junior agents without political connections. He quickly gained a reputation for thorough quality work that made agents with less talent and more ambition request to pair off with him, against normal Bureau policy that discouraged partnerships. While said partner curried favor and gave interviews, Sam turned over rocks and made sense of what he found there, and they rose together until his partner springboarded into the sort of high-profile assignment only political animals ever got - whereupon another up-and-comer would latch onto him. Sam didn't mind. Six or eight years into his career, his idealism had mellowed into professionalism, and he'd cared less about who got the credit than getting the job done – as long as the ones who'd reached the upper rungs of the ladder on his shoulders remembered his name when he'd asked for a favor. Sam was a team player.

His assignments got bigger and more important, and involved him with players outside the Bureau. He'd been one of the first agents to embrace the joint-duty concept, long before it became a Directive, and had made friends – and opened channels – in a handful of other agencies. He'd met Michael Westen during a domestic-spying case, and they'd gotten as friendly as operatives could who worked at agencies that competed as often as they cooperated. Sam became known as a guy at the Bureau who worked with everybody, and was often approached for help in cases that crossed agency turf lines. He could also be counted on to contact his extra-Bureau associates when he found a puzzle piece that fit someone else's investigation. Sam was a team player. But he was also proving his worth as a consultant. By the time he was fifteen years into his career, he was planning his twenty-year retirement. Florida beckoned, but he had no intention of living there solely on a Bureau pension.

He'd acquired practice and skill in undercover work, and had been part of some big cases that never made the news but were talked about for years in the covert community. Once, he'd uncovered evidence that a fellow agent was providing cooperation of a different sort, to people on the wrong side of the ethical divide. The FBI prided itself on the moral rectitude and incorruptibility of its people; its stringent application screening was supposed to insure that the reliability of Bureau personnel was beyond suspicion. An agent working for the bad guys was unsupportable. But Sam had been unsure how to act. He knew that regular policemen spat on the ground in front of cops who ratted out even the most corrupt of their brethren, because the resulting investigation always turned into a witch hunt that implicated others whose only error had been trust. In this tight-knit organization, being shunned by his associates for whistle-blowing would effectively end his career.

Instead, Sam had confided his suspicions to selected colleagues, and presented his evidence. Word had spread, quietly, and before long, the bent agent had found himself encapsulated: fellow agents were no longer forthcoming with details of their investigations, and his opinions were no longer sought. He'd been forced to use riskier methods of obtaining information for his "clients", and had eventually been caught red-handed. No dirt stuck to anyone else, and Sam Axe had been toasted privately in FBI circles as a team player who loved the Bureau, a man who could be counted on to do the smart thing.

_So what_, he thought, _am I doing with these two?_ He slurped down his second free mojito and stood, just a couple seconds behind Mike and Fi. It was just like Mike, he thought. They could have spent the afternoon talking business at that table, eating and drinking on Lynch's tab, but Mikey wouldn't hear of taking favors and maybe incurring an obligation to someone he didn't trust.

They met back at the bunker Mike used for an apartment. Michael, in a car that caught the eye of every cop he passed, drove his Charger like a geriatric unless need dictated otherwise, and could be counted on to arrive last. Sam got there second, behind Fi; the girl drove like a maniac, and Sam couldn't figure how she avoided getting jailed or killed in Miami traffic. She was leaning against her car and on her phone when he pulled up. She snapped it shut as Sam got out, and he was sure she'd been talking to Mike.

He walked up to her car, which was parked closer to the sheetmetal gate that closed off Mike's parking area. "Talk him out of it yet?"

"You can't want to work for that man."

"That depends on what he's really after. We could all use the money."

She folded her arms, looking stubborn. They could hear the Charger rumbling down the road.

Conversation waited until they were all inside. Then Mike headed for the fridge. "Sam, what do you know about this guy?"

"Just to save time, what did Fi tell you?"

"Not much." Mike pulled out a yogurt, then offered Sam a beer. "She was unusually hard to understand on the phone. But she seems to think John Lynch is the real Keyser Sose."

She bridled. "He blew up the biggest shipment of small arms anyone has seen since World War Two. Private shipment, anyway. Then he killed every man who ever sold him a gun. Just to corner the market and drive up prices."

Michael glanced Sam's way, eyebrows raised.

Sam shrugged. "It was a little before your time. You were still in the Army, I think. Before Fi's time, too, but nobody holds a grudge like the Irish." Before she could retort, he went on, "Army vet, like you. Green Beret in Vietnam, Fifth SOG. Got caught up in that Project GAMMA business and resigned his commission… um, in sixty-nine, I think."

Mike's spoon paused on its way to his mouth. "Wait. He was an officer in sixty-nine?"

"Lieutenant, yeah."

"How _old_ is he?"

"Forty-six, I think."

"Then how could he have been an officer in Vietnam?"

"Oh. _Born_ in forty-six, Mikey."

"You didn't catch that bit about 'Provos' and 'IRA'?" Fi was fingering her purse's zipper again. "There hasn't been a difference since I learned to crawl."

"He doesn't look sixty." Michael resumed eating.

Fiona sniffed. "All that clean living, no doubt. And I'm sure he's sleeping sound at night, once the little Tinkerbelle gives him his nightcap." She looked from Sam's face to Mike's. "Oh, come on. You didn't see it?"

Sam cleared his throat and plowed on. "Anyway. The CIA picks him up before the ink is dry on his discharge, and he does DAP and other covert stuff for them for awhile, about ten years. Then he drops off the grid again."

"Drops off the grid." Mike scraped the bottom of his cup.

"Right, nobody knows where he was and, believe me, people have looked. About eighty-five, he comes up out of whatever hole he's been in with a huge wad of cash. He establishes himself in the East Coast arms trade, big time. In eighty-seven, he puts together the biggest small-arms deal ever. He's got an unknown banker with deep pockets for financing, and an East Coast crime family acting as contractor and brokering the deal. Everybody in twenty states with a gun to sell was part of the supplier chain." Sam swigged his beer. "Word was the shipment was headed for Northern Ireland. But even the IRA didn't have the cash to pay for it. Others said Libya was bankrolling it, to equip rebel armies in Africa."

"It was never intended to leave the dock." Fiona's mouth was a slash in her face.

"Probably not. Right after it was loaded and ready to leave port, the ship blew sky-high, pieces coming down a mile away. Witnesses said it looked like a nuke. And within twenty-four hours, every guy in the supplier network was gone. I mean, _gone_, never seen again. Including Lynch. Most everybody thought he went up with the boat, along with a few other prime movers. The East Coast gun trade never really came back from it. All of a sudden none of the established players wanted to deal guns there anymore.

"But _somebody_ moved into the space the missing dealers left, and bought up what little was left at fire sale prices. But the weapons never reappeared on the market; best guess was that they were sold overseas. Sewed the market up tight. For a year or two, you couldn't buy weapons in quantity east of the Mississippi. And if you wanted to sell, there was only one outfit to go to."

Michael set the business envelope he'd gotten from Lynch and laid it on the counter. "A tight setup. Lynch's?"

"Who else?" Fi said hotly. "He blew those guns up to create a shortage, and killed off all his competition."

Sam shrugged. "Didn't seem that way. Whoever cornered the market didn't do much with it. Lynch had disappeared, just like all the others. This mysterious player stayed in the background and dealt through proxies, and no one ever saw a face to go with the money. Until late oh-four, when informants in Germany claimed to recognize a man putting together a big-lot purchase as John Lynch with a messed-up face. Guess he was on the boat after all. I'd like to hear _that_ story."

"So would I," Fiona said. "My people grieved those Widowmakers like family." AR-18s, "Widowmakers", were a favorite assault rifle of the IRA and a popular import from the States. At least a couple hundred of them had been aboard the boat.

Michael removed the contents of the envelope and spread them on the counter: a thumb-thick sheaf of hundreds, a business card, and a couple of pictures. They looked over the pics, a pair of head-and-shoulders shots of a tall slender Hispanic boy and a girl with tousled-looking blonde hair and green eyes, both in their teens. "This is what I'm interested in right now."

"Michael," she said, "Surely you're not going to find them for him."

"Not before I know why he wants them. You think it's strange he didn't provide their names?"

Sam looked at the pictures closely. The kids were photographed face-front, dressed in blue coveralls sort of resembling prison uniforms, but they didn't look like arrest shots; the kids were too relaxed. "They're probably not using any he knows them by."

"But we could have used them to build some trust with the kids if we find them." Michael started counting the money. "Ten grand is a bit much for a ten-minute talk. This is don't-get-curious money. I think Lynch wants us to know as little as possible about these kids. Which makes me determined to learn as much as possible."

Sam noticed that the coveralls had a white bar over the right breast pocket with printing on it. "Mikey, do you have a magnifying glass?" A moment later, glass in hand, he read, "'Morales, H.' The girl's reads 'Davis, J.'"

"Born between, say, eighty-eight and ninety-four," Michael said, "and disappeared no more than three years ago. It's a start. Sam?"

"I'll see what I can do."

"And anything else you can dig up on Lynch."

Sam's phone rang. He checked the call ID: blank. "Huh." He flipped it open. "Hello?"

"_Mr. Axe._" Lynch's little blonde, Anna. "_Hi. How's the shoulder?_"

"Uh, the shoulder's fine, thanks."

"_Listen,_ _Jack's out for the night, and I don't feel like sitting here alone. Would you like to meet me for a drink?_"

Mike and Fi were watching him curiously. Fi widened her eyes and tilted her head, looking like a ditz, and raised a hand level with her chin. Sam nodded. "Uh, I could do that, maybe. But give me a chance to freshen up. I'm still in the same grass-stained clothes, you know?"

A giggle. "_Bay View Yacht Club. Say, ninety minutes? The desk clerk says they serve the best mojitos in town. A bientôt._" She hung up.


	3. Playing the Game

_For a spy, suspicion is a professional virtue. As hard as you work to collect it, information, regardless of the source, is never taken at face value. Its trustworthiness, or 'confidence', increases with your ability to confirm it independently. And you can never trust information given to you freely by another spy without cross-checking. This is one reason spies avoid personal relationships. We're all born liars._

"Thank you for meeting me." The girl Anna sat across a small window table from Sam at the harborside restaurant. The room was sunny and bustling and noisy from the late lunch/early supper crowd lingering over their drinks.

"Maybe I was afraid not to." Sam sipped his drink and looked at her. She'd changed out of the Hawaiian shirt and shorts into a slinky little dress that shouted _money_ and made her look a little older; Sam, in his sport jacket and shirt with no tie, felt almost seedy by comparison. She also looked and smelled like a lot of temptation in a small package. She fit right in with the handful of yacht bunnies sipping wine at the bar as they scanned the crowd, or sharing tables with well-dressed older men scattered throughout the room: predators on the hunt.

"Pfft. You're not afraid of me. Not like that, anyway. But you're nervous, just the same." She sat with an elbow on the table and her chin cupped in her palm. "I wonder why. Why do you keep looking around? Are you expecting…" She stopped. "This place serves the best mojitos in town."

"Just about."

"It's one of your regular hangouts, isn't it?"

"I come here," he admitted.

"Are you looking for someone who knows you? Because you don't want to be seen with me?"

"Nothing personal. I just don't need that kind of trouble."

"'Trouble'. What sort of trouble?"

"Well," he said uncomfortably, "Miami's full of guys my age preying on young girls." _Although around here, it's usually the other way around._

She looked down into her fluted glass half-full of bottled water. "I don't want your friends to think badly of you."

"It's not that. There are a couple characters giving you the eye. Being with me makes them think you're easy prey. I get up from the table to use the bathroom, at least one of them will come over here."

She smiled sleepily. "Don't worry, I can take care of myself. _Without_ involving the police." She studied him some more. "There's something else."

He shrugged. "It's my girlfriend's favorite place."

Her hand rose to her mouth. "And she's the jealous type. Do you give her reason?"

He took another sip. "She thinks I lack commitment."

She smiled. "I have a feeling you're a ladies' man." She sipped from her glass. Sam noted that she wore her nails about half an inch long, immaculately trimmed to blunt points and coated with a pale coral polish. "I'll let you know if she comes through the door. What's she look like?"

"About fifty, but she looks younger. The kind of figure you get from dieting and fancy spas."

"Gee, that narrows it down to twelve women in the room already."

"Hazel eyes."

"More like it. Two. Hair?"

"Blonde. Just brushes her shoulders."

"I guess we're safe for now. Jewelry?"

"A big rock on her right hand. Third finger."

"No wedding band?"

"I don't play that."

She smiled. "Sensible. I'm sure there are plenty of presentable widows and divorcees your age in town. You like them rich?"

He paused before answering. "It's a plus."

She looked out the nearby window wall facing the marina. "Aren't they beautiful? Wouldn't you just love to sail away on one, go wherever you like?"

Sam shifted, even more uncomfortable now. In his days as a field agent, he'd faced plenty of attempts to steer or stall or derail an investigation. He'd turned down job offers, cash in envelopes and deposits in numbered accounts, and more than a few sexual propositions. The girl's line of conversation sounded too much like the start of negotiations. "I'll never own one of those. A ninety-footer's not something you save for in a piggy bank."

She was still looking out over the slips. "I've never been on a boat."

Sam took a quick swallow. _Did I just hear her up her offer?_ "Really."

She nodded. "Not even a rowboat. Planes, helicopters, buses, cars. Even a semi once. Never a boat. Is it as fun as it looks?"

He shrugged. "It depends."

She nodded towards the people lounging on the boats and strolling the docks. "They look like they're having fun."

"They're rich. They're always having fun."

She turned to him and leaned forward, half-closing her eyes. "What about you, Sam? Are you having fun? Not just this minute. In general, I mean. Do you wish you were rich?"

Sam carefully set down his glass and locked eyes. "Mike makes his own decisions. If you asked me here to hire a lobbyist or an informant, you're wasting your time."

She blinked, then smiled. "Heh. I was about to say that being wealthy is more comfortable than being poor, but it tends to create as many problems as it solves. Jack is a billionaire, but he doesn't spend the return on the money. I make a hundred thousand a year working for him, plus hefty bonuses, but most of my money sits in the bank. I never thought you were a man who'd sell his friends for a ninety-footer. I'm just making conversation. Really."

He flushed, thinking of when Mike had first contacted him in Miami. He'd been visited by two men he'd have taken for mooks if they hadn't presented FBI credentials. In their case, Sam could understand why they'd been paired up: it took both of them to add up to one real cop. Clearly, the Bureau's screening process had tipped further towards reliability at the cost of competence.

They'd acted like mooks, too, leaning on him like he was a lowlife with a rap sheet, threatening his hard-earned pension and demanding his help in "getting the goods" on Mike Westen. He'd been surprised to hear from Mike shortly before, and shocked to learn of that excellent agent's "burning", but he'd felt that, as a retiree out of the game, he was immune to the career concerns that made most of Mike's old associates turn their backs on him. He'd been wrong.

He'd decided to call in a few favors to get these two losers off his back, and discovered he'd already been tainted by his association with Mike Westen. Old colleagues couldn't help him, at least in this particular, because the orders that had sent the two bullies to his door had come from too high up the food chain. His former partners, now princes in the Bureau hierarchy, were strangely unavailable and never returned his calls. Agents Frick and Frack turned up the heat, showing up at business meetings and driving away his consulting clients. Then they started doing the same with his dates. He'd had several women get up and leave the table to him and the smirking men, never to be seen again.

Feeling trapped and sinking, he'd caved, agreeing to repeat Mike's confidences and snoop around. He'd tried hard to satisfy them while retaining Mike's trust, with mixed results. He'd hadn't been able to supply the agents with incriminating evidence that didn't exist, and before long, Mike had caught on – he _was_ a counterintelligence expert, after all – and the strain on their relationship had been severe for a while, until they'd found a way to turn Bureau suspicion to Mike's advantage by planting misinformation. "Conversation. Well, in that case, it'd be nice to have a million in the bank."

She nodded. "Good figure. Not enough to be a real burden, but enough to grant you some freedom of action." She sipped. "So, are you wearing a wire? Or do Michael and Fi trust your memory?"

"I'm not wearing a wire. But I wouldn't be surprised if one of them's watching us."

She raised her glass to her chin. "They're not. I'd know." She took a tiny sip, barely wetting her lips. "Actually, I'd know if you were wearing a wire, too. Michael was, earlier. Hobby-store stuff. If you take Jack's job, you guys will be able to afford better gear. Not a hard sell, just an observation."

"If you want to sell this job, you'll tell me what it's about. We don't like being used as tools, all right?"

"Not anymore, you mean. Does Michael miss his old job, do you think?"

Sam shifted in his seat. "Sometimes. Don't know what he'd do if they offered, though. He just wants his reputation back."

She smiled behind her glass.

"What?" He said.

"Just thinking about men and their pride. Michael's already rebuilt his reputation. How many of his clients come to him through word of mouth?"

"The people Mike works with now don't know about his burn notice. Hell, they don't know what a 'burn notice' is."

"And if you told them about his and explained it, they wouldn't care. They know him by what he does, not what others say about him. That's a reputation that can't be marred with a few forgeries."

He sipped his drink. "Your boss has a reputation. A bad one."

"Don't I know it. But reputations can be misleading. If he was the sort of man everyone thinks he is, he wouldn't be trying to hire you to coax the information out of Corteza, would he?"

"I don't know. Maybe he's lost his taste for the rough stuff since Newtown."

"Believe me, he's done plenty of rough stuff since then." She reached for his glass. "What does that taste like?"

He held it out of reach. "If the staff see you sipping my drink before they see some ID, they might ask us to leave."

"Is that a joke?"

"No. They won't risk serving someone underage. Hell, I'm not sure you're not."

She gave him a Mona Lisa smile. "Would ID prove anything?"

"Not to me. Have you ever had alcohol?"

"Sam Axe, I could drink you under the table."

Sam sensed an opportunity. "Big talk, Miss Soda Water."

She leaned forward. "Put some money on it? I've got a million in an account in the Caymans. Name the wager."

Sam swallowed. His net worth consisted of his car and about six hundred in his wallet.

"You want odds?" She pressed. "How about ten thousand to one? Got a benjamin?"

"You don't mean that."

"Yes, I do."

"You're crazy."

"I told you I never spend it. What's the point in having money if you can't have fun with it?"

It was a sucker's bet; she didn't have a chance. Sam knew that, contrary to popular belief, the human body didn't develop a tolerance for alcohol; in fact, the opposite was true. Long-term alcohol abuse damaged the liver and reduced its ability to metabolize booze. A practiced drinker could learn not to do anything _too_ embarrassing after he'd had a few, and to drive in a manner that mostly compensated for his slowed reflexes and degraded motor skills so as to avoid police attention, as long as nothing unforeseen occurred requiring good judgment. But acquired skills didn't slow the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream or speed up the metabolizing process. When a person's BAC reached a certain range, they went down, whether they were a first-time drinker or a fifty-year veteran.

You could slow the process a little with careful eating, but by far the biggest factor affecting alcohol absorption was body mass. Sam looked across the table at Anna: five-one and a hundred pounds, he guessed, literally half his size. If she tried to match him drink for drink, her head would be on the table before his legs got wobbly. And maybe sometime before that, she might let slip a few secrets. "I've got a C-note. But I won't lay it down for anything but even money."

"Gallant. Since you've got the home-field advantage, do I get to pick the drink?"

He considered. "I already started on rum."

"I won't mix it up on you. Rum it is."

"And if you pick pina coladas, you can have my hundred now. It's not worth _that_ kind of hangover."

She laughed. "Gawd, no. No frothy concoctions with sliced fruit and little umbrellas on the rim. What kind of girl do you think I am?" She raised her glass, and a waiter appeared three seconds later; it was that kind of place. "Do you stock Bacardi?"

"Of course, miss," the youngish man said. "Anything you want, I'm sure." He eyed her. "That is…"

She pulled an ID from her purse and presented it. He studied it a moment and nodded. "Anything you want, miss."

"Do you stock Bacardi One-fifty-one?"

He smiled. "Certainly. Would you like a flaming drink? The bartender makes a very dramatic Blazing Saddle."

"No, I'd like a bottle. And a couple of shot glasses."

The man's eyes widened. "Ah, we don't bring bottles to the table, miss."

"Of course you do." She nodded towards a nearby table where a couple sipped from flutes, a cut-glass wine decanter between them. "Just pour it in one of those. I'm sure you can find some pretty one-ounce glasses, can't you?" She gave him a smile and a banknote, and he left. She turned to Sam. "Mustn't look like longshoremen at a dockside dive, dear me no. We have to get soused like gentry."

"Anna," he said, "that stuff's poison. You don't need to do this."

"Are you kidding? One-fifty-one is my fave. With Coleman fluid a close second." She placed her elbows on the table, laced her fingers together, and rested her chin on the backs. "Chicken? Only cost you fifty to back out."

He considered it. Any alcoholic beverage you could light was concentrated enough to poison you; a very bad choice for a drinking contest. Was the possibility of getting Lynch's little confidante drunk and chatty worth the risk? Again, his concern was for her, not himself. He finally decided to go ahead with it; he could always concede if it looked like she was putting herself in danger. "Last one with their head off the table wins. Unconsciousness is optional."

"Hmp. Are you always so protective of the weaker sex?"

The waiter arrived with a tray bearing Anna's order: a cut-glass decanter filled with dark amber liquid and two tiny stemmed glasses cut in the same style, too narrow for Sam to stick a thumb into. He filled the slender vessels with a flourish and set one in front of each of them. "Anything else? A meat and cheese selection?"

"No, thank you," she said. "That will be all." After he left, Anna picked up her flute, eyes on his. She threw the drink into the back of her throat and set her glass on the table with a little clink. "Hoo."

He copied her action, knowing the liquid would sear his mouth and throat if he didn't. He swallowed quickly, feeling it travel downward like a spreading fire. The fumes rose up his nose anyway, and he coughed twice. "Smooth."

She grinned at him. "Last one to empty his glass pours for both."

He relaxed. She'd unwittingly given him a way to control the pace and get her loopy without endangering her life. He picked up the decanter. "Fine."

Some time later, she folded her arms on the table and said, "You know, I could _so_ fall in love with you."

Sam's drink stopped just short of his lips. "Whuh?" He turned his eyes to the bottle. Focusing was kind of hard, but the bottle looked about a third empty. He struggled to figure how many shots were missing, and decided they'd had four or five apiece – which, with this stuff, was eight or ten drinks.

"S'true. 'M not sayin I _am_…" she lifted her glass to her lips and stared at it a moment when she realized it was empty. "Huh. But, I got a thing for older guys, and you're awful cute, an, you been so nice." She grinned crookedly. "An' not jus' cause you want information out of me. Or the other thing. You treat girls nice, I can tell. You remind me of Jack."

"Really." He set the glass back down, still full, and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. They'd started drinking about three hours ago. The lunch crowd was mostly gone. "Are you and Jack…"

"Took you long enough to ask." Her head wobbled as she chuckled, and drifted downward. "Bet you think it's sick, don' you? Think he's some ol' pervert bumpin with a girl who could be his gran'daughter." She waggled a finger at him. "Wanted him the firs' day I met him. I made a play, and he put me down. _Hard_. I mean, face in the _dirt_. Took me two years to get im to kiss me." She leaned back, blinked. "What were we talking about?"

"The job."

"Were we?" The dazed expression was replaced by a sly grin. "_No_, we weren't. We were talking about the time you blew up Maddie's house, and you found out you're no carpenter. Bet you had the charm set on high to get outta _that_ one."

He felt a twist in his gut. What had he told her about Madeline? He forced his mind back through the previous three hours' conversation, and was amazed at how much he'd been running off at the mouth. He'd given her a book-length account of his role as a senior member of Westen and Company. He'd told her stories about life in the Bureau and the SEALs. He'd talked about his early dating experiences and boyhood friends. He'd talked politics, cars, and sports. Through it all, she'd listened attentively, smiled and laughed at the appropriate times, made knowledgeable comments, and jumped in with a question or a story of her own when his tongue or memory tired. She did conversation very well. But she hadn't told him a damned thing he'd come to learn.

He threw back his drink and reached for the bottle. As he filled her glass, he said, "You hold your liquor pretty well. I'm surprised." He curled his fingers around his own glass as he touched the decanter's rim to it, so she couldn't see he wasn't filling it. "Mentirita. That Jack's favorite drink?" He tossed the empty glass to his mouth at the same time Anna did her full one.

"He doesn't drink much. Usually he sticks with straight bourbon. I never saw him order a mixed drink before."

"Just in company, huh?" 'Mentirita' meant 'little lie' in Spanish; Cuba Libres were only called by that name in the sort of bar that had a photo of Castro tacked to the dartboard. Lynch had some very interesting friends. "I get the feeling he used to drink a lot."

"Off and on, I think. He was hitting the bottle kinda hard after he sent the kids off to hide. I think he felt bad he couldn't do more for them."

_At last._ "They look like good kids."

Her head bobbed. "They are. All of em."

_All of them?_ "Rescuing kids doesn't seem like his bag."

She gave him a crooked smile. "Sam," she said, "you have no _idea_ what his bag is." She reached for the decanter. "My turn to pour?"

He grabbed it by the neck. "I think you were still ahead of me last time." She seemed to be watching him more carefully this time, so he filled both glasses.

She stared into her glass. "So. Tell me about yourself."

He scoffed. "_Tell_ you about myself? You've got everything but my shoe size already."

"That might be interesting to know," she said, her voice low and filled with innuendo. "Sam, how do you get along with Fiona?"

He snorted. "Boy, are you barking up the wrong tree there." He didn't realize he he'd tossed his drink until he'd done it. "We almost shot each other once. It's how we met."

"I can't imagine. So, she doesn't show an interest?" She tossed back her drink and took the decanter from his fingers.

"No. Not a chance. It's her and Mike all the way." He watched her pour. She didn't try any funny stuff; in fact, she overfilled her glass, making a tiny puddle.

"Whups." She set the bottle down with a clink. "What kind of partner is she? Is she hard to work with?"

"She's all right. No, really, she's good. A little emotional sometimes, but she thinks fast on her feet, knows her fieldcraft. We're past the trust issues, so that's all good." He stared into his glass. "What kind of partner is Jack Lynch?"

"In bed, or out?" She giggled. "Sorry, couldn't help it. You should have seen your face." She settled. "The absolute best. Smart, inventive, resourceful. Used to command. Knows his people, and treats em right." She leaned across the table at him. "I know you've heard stories, and not just from Fi. You've heard stories about Michael too. Judge Jack from your own experience."

"Sharing a drink with him doesn't give me much to go on. Picking up the tab doesn't make him somebody I can trust."

"Think about how he's dealing with Corteza, then." He noticed she seemed a lot less drunk now. "He's our best lead to the kids, and Jack's in more hurry than he lets on, but heesh screwing around with him, trying to get you to weasel it out of him. Believe me, ten minutes with him is all _I'd_ need, or Jack either. But Corteza's a good guy, and Jack 'spects him. So here we are."

"Anna," he said, leaning forward until their foreheads were almost touching, "tell me about the kids. That's the sticking point. Give me something I can take back to Mike and Fi."

She stared at his lips as he spoke, and licked her own. Then she sat back and tossed off her drink. "Drink up. I need 'nother one."

He obliged and refilled. "Well?"

She tossed back the deadly stuff, then nearly tipped the glass over when she set it down. Sam decided she was about at her limit, and held on to his full glass. The room around him seemed a bit unsteady. She stared at him with a little smile on her face that made him uneasy. Finally she said, "Sam, you like me?"

He held her eyes. "Yeah. I do. But I don't have any reason to trust you."

"What's trust got to do with reason? You th' kinda guy who'd get a girl drunk an take her to your room?"

He swallowed. "No."

"Too bad, Jack wouldn' be half as mad at me for telling. He knows my weaknesses." Her head dipped downward until her chin rested on her glass. "Uh oh. Room's turning. Guess I'm in no shape anyway. Listen. Jack adopted five kids, teenagers. They're the best. Kids of some of his ol' covert-ops buddies who went dead or missing. The two kids he sent here are old classmates of theirs. He knew their dads too. They were witnesses to a crime, the kind you don't report to the police if you want to live."

"What sort of crime is that? Organized?"

She stared blurrily at him. "Very. The sort committed by the people who burned Michael."

Sam grunted. If true, Mikey would prosecute the case like it was a crusade. Which was precisely why he couldn't take the girl's statement at face value. "Family of friends. Friends of family."

"Yup." Her eyes closed softly.

Her little purse lay on the table. He reached carefully for it and lifted it silently. He placed it in his lap out of sight and opened it.

No weapons. A small notebook and pen. The top page was blank, but he quietly tore it off and stuck it in his pocket. Her cellphone was locked, so he couldn't access the call log or directory. Her wallet held nine thousand in cash and several cards in three names, including a Black Card and a California driver's license that listed her as "Anne Devereaux," twenty-six, from Los Angeles. He wrote the card and license numbers on his wrist with her pen. No makeup but lip gloss. He regarded her long lashes resting on her cheeks and smiled. _A real-life babe–assassin. Who can't hold her liquor._

The last item was a small photo wallet. He unsnapped it carefully and looked through the dozen pictures inside. Most of them were group shots apparently taken by Anna, since she only appeared in two of them. The other subjects were five teenagers, two boys and three girls, and Lynch. The kids were a good-looking bunch, like Davis and Morales. The photos caught them in various activities: a big red-headed girl looking up in surprise from a computer terminal, green eyes shining like a cat's; a blond boy sitting cross-legged on a bed, strumming a guitar, with a dark girl lounging across the mattress behind him; an Oriental kid and a little punk teeny, game controllers in hand, grinning at the TV screen as they played. One was a poolside scene, everybody but Lynch in frame and dressed in swimsuits. Anna was smiling self-consciously as the blond boy pulled her into the picture and the others surrounded her, also smiling. A shot of her alone, hands in the kitchen sink. Lynch sitting on a couch, his face wide with surprise and the paper in his hands crumpling as the teeny with the black-and-purple hair dropped into his lap. Another of Lynch, apparently horsing around with the Oriental boy on the lawn as the girls watched, calling encouragement and clapping. _Like a big happy family._

He put everything back together and replaced the purse just as Anna's chin slipped off the glass. It skidded across the table and he caught it before it reached the edge.

She looked at him, eyes wide. "Did I…"

"Fraid so."

She smiled crookedly. "Least I woke up with my clothes on. Gawd. I remember any of this in th' morning, I won't be able to look you in the eye. You must think I'm the biggest slut." She stood, swaying, and fished clumsily through her purse. She pulled out her wallet. It slipped from her fingers and landed on the table. She extracted a hundred-dollar bill, peering at it a moment, and dropped it on the table. "Fair an square."

"Let me help you."

"Oh, _sure_. An' when I got you up t'my room, I'd prolly d'sgrace myself before I passed out. See ya."

"Anna, you can't drive like this."

"Wouldn' dream of it. I'll call a cab at the desk."

"Anna-"

"Nope nope nope." She waved a hand as she turned, almost upending the tray of a passing waiter. "I'll be fine. You stay here an write your report, or whatever." She wobbled away.

-0-

Once Anna was in the corridor and out of sight of the dining room, all the clumsiness disappeared from her gait. She approached the reception desk and presented a parking stub to the young man there. "My car, please," she said crisply. "The red Mustang convertible."

"Right away, miss."

She smiled, keeping well back and turning her head towards the windows overlooking the street so the valet couldn't smell her breath. "No hurry. I need to visit the little girl's room. Should have done that first, but I thought you'd be busier."

The attendant smiled. "It'll be waiting when you come back."

"Great." She passed him a twenty. "Do you have a phone book, by chance? I'd like to look at it when I come out."

"No problem."

In the ladies' room, she made sure she was alone, then leaned into the washbasin and, with no sound or sign of distress, spewed into the bowl. The dark amber liquid came out looking exactly as it had going in. She wrinkled her nose, rinsed the sink, wiped her mouth and reapplied her lip gloss, and checked her face in the mirror. She looked fresh as morning.

Back at the desk, she opened the white pages while the attendant got her car. She reached the _W's_ and flipped through until she found _Westen, Mdln._ She smiled a Mona Lisa smile. "And what sort of spy shares a zip code with his mom and lets her list her name in the phone book?"


	4. The Devil You Know

_Whether you're dealing with informants, double agents, fellow travelers, or your own chain of command, you have to be alert for hidden agendas. An asset's motives are seldom simple or pure. But that usually makes them easier to handle, not less; self-interest is more reliable and predictable than idealism. Understand what's really driving the people you're working with, and you have the foundation for a working relationship – spy-talk for having a firm grip on somebody's jewels._

Michael pulled the half-full carafe out of the gurgling coffeemaker, filled a mug with the extra-strong brew, and slid it across the counter to Sam. "Here. You look awful."

Sam leaned heavily on the counter and picked up the mug in both hands. "I look like I feel then." He sipped. "Ow." He sipped again.

"How much did you two _drink_?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." Then he told him. "She challenged me to a drinking contest, can you believe it? We matched shots of one-fifty-one until she passed out. I bet we downed over half a fifth." He took another sip. "I'm gonna have a morning after that starts at sundown."

"Every time you meet that girl alone, you come away looking like you were hit by a bus. Maybe I should have had Fi shadow you instead of checking out Corteza."

"I got back okay, didn't I? What did she find out?"

"She hasn't checked in yet. Did you get anything?"

"I found out she's got zero respect for her money. Everything else she told me, I'd want to check."

"Such as?"

Sam said slowly, watching him, "Such as… Lynch is hiding them from an outfit like the one that burned you. Maybe the same one."

Michael took a moment to digest that. "Why?"

"Son and daughter of a couple of his old covert-ops buddies. She didn't say which outfit, whether it was Special Forces, CIA… or whoever he was working for after that, before he went freelance. Sounds like they stumbled into an op or something, and Lynch thinks their lives are in danger."

"Why does he want to meet with them now?"

"Um, didn't come up."

Michael frowned.

"She wasn't exactly a good interrogation subject by then, okay? She drank a _lot_. She could barely walk when she-" Sam stopped short.

"What?"

"She was wearing stiletto heels, six-inchers. I know a lot of women can't walk in those when they're sober."

Michael's phone chimed. He checked the number before answering. "Fi?"

"_Michael. I've been to our man's house and business. He lives in a quaint little bungalow, kind of reminds me of your mother's. It's in a tidy Hispanic neighborhood not far from his cigar factory – which, by the way, is a lot less grand and industrial than the name implies. He looks to live alone. I couldn't stay long without drawing attention. It's that sort of neighborhood."_

Michael wasn't sure what she meant by that: whether the neighbors were close and inquisitive, or whether it was a bad place for a strange woman alone, or something else entirely, like the 'neighborhood watch' they'd encountered in Little Dominica. He let it pass. "How about the cigar factory?"

"_I didn't get much past the front office, but I got a bit of information. I told the receptionist a story about being a buyer for a chain of cigar bars in New England, and we chatted awhile. Corteza's out of the office a lot. He has forty-odd employees in two shifts making cigars from Cuban seed leaf tobacco. All middle-aged Cuban women, by the way. It's all very laid-back and traditional; he even has someone read to the ladies while they work, rolling cigars at big wooden tables. I found the employee entrance and loitered till shift change, just in case. No sign of our runaways." _She added, _"And no sign of a tail."_

"Maybe Lynch really is keeping them off us."

"_I was thinking of a tail hired by Lynch, actually."_

He looked at Sam, sitting hunched over the counter with his chin on one forearm and a hand over his eyes. "For what it's worth, I doubt Lynch brought any help but the little blonde, and Sam's taken her out of play for the night."

"_Really. I'm sure I don't want the details."_

"He got her drunk, Fi. Stone drunk. He's here now, bracing for an epic hangover. Come over, and we'll talk about what he picked up from her."

"_Not yet. It seems not all the workers live close by. One's headed for the bus stop. I think I'll get on too."_

-0-

Sam was wakened by the thudding behind his eyes that sent secondary shocks into his ears and down his neck. He lifted his head off the counter, too quickly, and groaned; it felt as if his brain had been replaced by a water balloon that sloshed inside his skull with any sudden motion, pulling on his inner ears and eyeballs. He was sure his head weighed about a hundred pounds, and he'd tip over and hit the floor if he wasn't careful of his balance.

The day's final minutes of sunlight drifted through the windows and showed him a bottle of extra-strength pain reliever on the counter within easy reach. He took four, washing them down with the cold coffee still in his mug, then slid carefully off the stool and shuffled to the bathroom. By the time he came out, the house was dark.

He wondered where Mike had gone. The painkillers on the counter spoke of plans for an extended absence. He thought of calling, and decided against; for all he knew, Mikey was spending the night with Fi. Their on-again-off-again relationship made him grind his teeth sometimes; he didn't understand how the two of them could stay so close without resolving things one way or the other. If he'd been in Mike's shoes, he'd have invited Fi to share his house long ago, prepared to fight with her every day and make up every night. But, as addicted to living on the edge as Mike seemed, there were some uncertainties he just wasn't comfortable with.

Knowing he wouldn't get back to sleep before the capsules kicked in, Sam flipped on a few lights and warmed another mugful of coffee in the microwave while he debated whether to stay or drive home; he wasn't sure of his welcome, arriving in his present condition. He noticed the numbers on his wrist, and decided to stay put and make a few phone calls – including one to his girlfriend. He'd never been so glad to get her voicemail.

While he waited for calls back, he sipped his reheated brew and thought about his 'date' with Anne Devereaux – if that was her real name, which he kind of doubted. Even if the backstory she'd provided during their conversation matched the records linked to her ID, it could just be a cover. He steered his mind away from the invitation he'd seen in those half-closed steel-blue eyes and concentrated on sifting through the information she'd yielded up.

He pulled the slip of notebook paper from his pocket and straightened it out on Michael's mousepad. Using a soft pencil, he lightly went over the page, bringing out the impressions of several phone numbers. Even if the drivers' license and credit cards turned out to be dead ends, he thought, the phone numbers might tell him something. He noted that they were numerically close, as if they might be numbers in a single office network or some such. He decided to run them rather than try them, and made another call.

He thought about the photos he'd studied all too briefly. _If only I could have copied them._ His gut told him that, however immersed in deception Lynch and Anna were, and whatever their real game was, those pictures were genuine. He tried to ignore the residual ache behind his eyes and the disjointed feeling that was part of a serious hangover, and summoned his memory and eye for detail.

If the pictures had all been taken in the same area, the climate must be warm, he decided: he remembered several tropical plants in the outdoor scenes. That went with the California ID, though he doubted she was really from Los Angeles; a third of Cali's residents could be said to live in the greater L.A. metropolitan area, which made it a good cover address. The indoor shots revealed a very fancy crib indeed, with high ceilings, expensive furnishings, and _objects d'art_ all over. Wherever this place was, it was no hideout; it was a home someone took pride in.

Next, he considered the people in the photos, and their interactions. None of the pics looked to have been posed; about half of them were 'gotcha' shots. Alone or together, the kids looked comfortable and at-home, and Lynch and Anna were clearly part of their group. Sam imagined the life of a gunrunner as one with many acquaintances and few friends, but there seemed to be a real bond between the cool criminal and these teenagers. Lynch and the Oriental boy had been grinning like fools as they squared off on the lawn with grass in their hair and the girls hooting and clapping in the background. And Anna's shy but warm little smile as the blond boy had drawn her into their group photo was the real deal. _She and Lynch must be very different people at home._

But which man was Westen and Company dealing with?

"_You have no idea what Jack's bag is."_

Sam struggled to get his aching head around it. How could a man rassle with his adopted kids on Sunday afternoon, and put killing tools in the hands of criminals and terrorists on Monday? What kind of man would sell guns…

_Sell guns…_

An idea took fuzzy shape in his mind. It fit the facts that he knew, but it ran so counter to his experience in law enforcement that he knew he'd need to check it every way he could think of.

He got busy. He fired up Mike's computer. He found a pad and jotted notes. He brewed a fresh pot of coffee and downed two more painkillers. He worked the phone, the addresses of his calls moving westward with the sun until he reached the West Coast, and kept making calls until the people on the other end started sounding sleepy and disgruntled when they picked up. But by then, Sam had a clear picture, and it made him shake his head in wonder. _Hard to believe nobody spotted this before. Then again, it was only the pictures of him as a happy family guy that sent me in this direction. Who'd ever guess this was the man behind the one he lets everybody see?_ He slumped in the chair and closed his eyes.

Sam started awake, staring at the blank laptop screen. Michael shut the door behind him. "Sam. What are you doing?"

"Working. What time is it?" It was still dark outside.

"Four A.M. Fi got a lead on another business Corteza runs, a janitorial service that cleans office buildings downtown." Mike drew a mugful from the carafe. "We looked over a couple of the crews. No sign of the kids. We'll probably check out the others tonight." He looked at Sam over the rim of the mug. "You?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah. I think I've got the real story on Lynch. But let me lay it all out. Otherwise, you're gonna think I'm having an alcohol delusion or something."

The door creaked open, and Fiona peeked in. "Hm. Should have known you boys wouldn't have got to bed. Am I interrupting?"

"Come on in, Fi," Sam said. "You need to hear this. Doubt you're gonna believe it, though."

She shot Mike a curious glance, but joined them.

"Okay." Sam marshaled his thoughts. "Mike, do you know how much money the government spends to control the gun trade?"

"Too much, for what they accomplish."

He nodded. "Billions, just for interdiction. If you throw in what they spend to trace a weapon _after_ a crime is committed with it – you know, registration and inventory laws, databases on ammo and barrel rifling, all that – it's billions more. And best guess is that ninety percent slips through anyway. Figure it all up, the government is paying six to ten times street value for the weapons it confiscates."

Fi broke in. "What's this got to do with Lynch and those kids?"

"Nothing to do with the kids. But…" Sam took a breath. "I've been talking to people. FBI, CIA, ATF, DHS, everybody I can think of who might have a file on Lynch." He stopped. "Well, I didn't get much at the Bureau. Agents Lane and Harris aren't fonts of information."

"Why are you talking to them?" Fiona poured a cup and sat at the counter. "What about all your other boys there?"

"Frick and Frack are my flappers now, Fi. Since I started working with Mikey, all my dealings with the Bureau go through them. Nobody else takes my calls."

Mike's cup paused on its way to his mouth. "I'm sorry, Sam."

"Yeah, well, it forced me to look up old contacts in the SEALs to rebuild my network. And, you know, I might have been with the FBI longer, but SEALs was better time and better people. Anyway," he went on with a shrug, "everybody in law enforcement who's heard of Lynch says he's bad news, a former black-ops guy who went into business for himself and became a major player in the arms trade. And not just small stuff, either. He's bought shoulder-fired missiles, mines, poison gas shells. Armored vehicles. Hell, one source told me about a time he was negotiating with some Georgian Mafia types for a warhead. But the authorities got an anonymous tip, caught the crooks breaking into the storage facility. There was talk of indicting Lynch, but it fizzled. Not enough evidence, they said."

Mike whistled softly. Fi looked vindicated.

"But here's the thing," Sam went on. "Every guy in the trade has sold to Lynch at one time or another. He's always looking to buy. Do you wanna guess how many I found who'd admit _buying_ from him?"

Mikey got it right away. "Nobody?"

"Not quite. He's done some deals with counterrevolutionaries and insurgents with good human-rights records. And a time or two, he's come to some downtrodden group getting their asses kicked around by a local warlord and offered them a deal. His prices and terms are always rock-bottom on those deals. His competitors call it 'Lynch's pro bono work.' But every gun he's been known to sell doesn't add up to a twentieth of what he's bought."

Fi's eyebrows gathered. "Where are they going, then?"

"My guess? The bottom of the Atlantic." Sam looked at them in turn. "Like I said, the government would be doing way better just to buy the guns off the black market."

After a moment, Fi said, "_No_. They could never spend that much money and keep it a secret. And if it ever got out…"

Michael opened the fridge and took out a yogurt. "How much money are we actually talking? What does he spend?"

"Thirty to fifty million a year, about. That's recent spending, which is down some. He's dropped upwards of a hundred mil on a single deal in the past. The Newtown deal cost him fifteen million in payments to his Mafia contractor, plus whatever he spent for the teams who took out his supplier chain. Hard to guess, but no less than thirty. In nineteen eighty-seven. Something like eighty million in today's money." He leaned back and rubbed his stiff neck. _She said I'd be sore._ He remembered how smoothly she'd taken him down: just a kid walking by, not worth a second glance as he'd watched the meet through his lens – then a blur of motion, and he was spitting grass with his back and shoulder on fire and her gone with his camera. "And that's something else. Who took out the dealers? Twenty guys, scattered from Ohio to Eastern Europe, taken down in a space of hours. They never knew what hit them, even the ones with bodyguards. And they weren't just killed, they disappeared, no traces, no signs of struggle. Like alien abduction. The guys who did it were real pros, and they made it look easy. They weren't just sweeping away Lynch's competition; they were sending a message to anybody who might be thinking of moving into the vacuum. Any idea where Lynch got a hundred guys with those kinds of skills?"

Fi piped up. "Murder, Incorporated?"

Sam looked sourly at her. "Very funny."

Like the 'lone spy', 'murder for hire' organizations were largely myth. Plenty of organizations employed their own in-house hitters, but there were very few freelancers who made a living killing for strangers. How would they advertise? Word of mouth? Cryptic ads in the newspaper? The risk of discovery and capture was simply too great. Conversely, almost everyone who spread the word around that they were looking for someone to do 'wet work' eventually found themselves contracting a hit with an undercover cop. If such an 'assassin's guild' existed, they would have to be doing repeat business for a limited number of shady clients, or contracting through an established clandestine organization that kept the arrangement very close. But neither Sam nor anyone he knew had a clue about such an operation. Carla had tried to play that game, and been caught out and destroyed when her schemes had gotten out of hand and she'd started killing people to cover her tracks. Sam, like most in his former line of work, was sure no such organization existed.

Mike scraped his yogurt cup's bottom. "What agency has that big a black-projects fund? Or that many men trained for covert direct action?"

"Besides the military? None." Sam shrugged. "None I know of, anyway. But nobody knows who Lynch was working for in the Eighties, either. The only way this fits together… Mike, I don't know who's behind him, but he's a Good Guy."

"Working under the same cover for thirty years? I know you did your homework on this, Sam, but that's a stretch. And there are still some big questions left."

"Yeah. Like, if he's working for some supersecret agency that's been around since platform shoes, and can pull a hundred mil out of a black bag for an op… who's got the juice to make _him_ look over his shoulder?"

Mike tossed his empty yogurt cup into the trash. "If we can find out, we'll have a way to move him. And maybe Corteza, too."

-0-

"Jack, you got a lot of balls coming here." Roger Humboldt smiled as he bent over his putter. "When I heard you were back in town, I let go my four-iron, almost put it in the pond. You got any idea how many people in Miami want your head on a plate?"

"It's been tried." John Lynch stood on the green a few steps away, hands in pockets, apparently unconcerned about the two large men flanking him. "I don't worry about it too much, Roger. I enjoy life."

"I had your money, I would too." Roger sank a two-foot putt and straightened. He gave a head shrug to one of his guards, who stepped to the hole and bent to retrieve the ball. "Only I'd retire for real and buy myself an island out in the Keys. What kind of deal are you here for?"

"What, I can't come around once in a while to catch up?"

Humboldt scanned the area. He was sure they were private, but Roger Humboldt hadn't risen so high in the Western arms trade without learning caution. "Jack, you haven't been to Miami in almost four years. I don't care how many old pals you come around and shoot the breeze with, you're here for something. Everybody knows it. They're either going batshit trying to figure it out, or holding their breath, waiting for you to show your hand." He smiled. "You gonna give me three guesses? Or are you really gonna make me start digging around?"

Lynch hesitated, then gave a head shrug. "I'm talking to some people."

Humboldt's pulse quickened. "Well, you know me. You got an idea, I'm always ready to listen." He dropped his club into his bag and started walking; Lynch walked beside him. The guard with the ball followed a few paces behind, as did the other guard who took the handle of the bag and towed it behind him. "So, _are_ you coming out of retirement?"

"No. But I still do the occasional job, if it sounds interesting."

"So we're not talking the usual stuff."

"Nope. There's still plenty of market in Central America, but I'll leave it to the up-and-comers."

Roger glanced back at his men and lowered his voice. "What, then?"

Lynch's eyes were unreadable behind his sunglasses, but Humboldt thought the spooky gunrunner's face was a little more blank than usual. "I was strolling El Malecón last week with an old friend."

Humboldt hesitated between one step and the next. El Malecón, Havana's famous seawall, was a traditional spot for confidential conversations and deals big and small. "That right? Didn't know any of them were still alive. Least, not on the island."

"He was rehabilitated, you might say. He says the cuisine at El Guayabo was good for his constitution. He can eat anything now."

Humboldt hesitated again. El Guayabo, Castro's lockup for political prisoners on Isla de la Juventud, was famous too. "They let him out?"

"The talk was officially unofficial. Seems someone's got his old boss worried about the buildup at Guantanamo. Worried enough to start thinking about upgrading the troops on his side of the fence."

Roger lowered his voice further. "How big an upgrade?"

"They want to shop us. Equipment, training cadre, the works. I'm putting together a catalogue, you might say." Lynch lowered his chin, and Humboldt looked away to avoid the sight of that blind eye staring at him from over the top of Lynch's sunglasses. Not that Humboldt was superstitious or anything, but Lynch had a way of creeping a guy out. "If nothing happens to screw it up, it'll be the biggest deal in twenty years, maybe longer."

_Since Newtown, you mean,_ Humboldt thought. "Where would they get the money?" The embargo and travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba were still in full force, and the Communist island nation had lost a huge subsidy when the Soviet Union had folded.

"They're not broke just because they can't sell sugar to us. They've got good trade relations with the rest of the world, especially Central and South America. The Beard's economic policies were what kept them scratching for a living, really. Now he's just a figurehead, things are changing some. The tourist trade is growing again, hotels are going up, and cruise ships even put in there, just not from U.S. ports. Students from Mexico to Bolivia are coming back to their medical schools. They've got cash."

"Is the deal really that solid? I heard Raúl Castro was crazier than his brother."

"About _El Norte_, he is, that's certain. Raúl thinks those ten thousand Marines at the south end of the island are a possible invasion force. That's why he sprung Osvaldo as a token of good faith to me. Also to give me a man I trusted to negotiate with. Cuba's armed forces are as antiquated as its taxicabs. They want this deal." They approached the next tee. "So, what do you think?"

"How soon?"

"Like I said, they want a catalogue from me. That's why I'm talking to everybody I can count on with a good inventory. It's going to take a little while – a week or two before we start talking money. Meantime, Roger, keep it close. We don't want anything to scare them off."

"No," Humboldt said as he bent to place his tee and ball. "We most certainly don't. Competitive pricing?"

"Not so long as they're dealing through me. I don't see anything wrong with making a little extra off these guys. We just can't let it get around why I'm here."

Humboldt thought about a conversation he'd had yesterday with several of his business associates, at a hurried meeting that had been called when they'd heard Jack Lynch was back in town. Over a champagne brunch, they'd discussed and speculated and opined. A couple of them had expressed an opinion that there was no room in the business for the old spook anymore, and that the truth should be made clear to him as forcefully as necessary. Humboldt had scoffed, "And which of you is going to put a bell around _that_ cat's neck?"

"He's got a lot of mileage out of Newtown, but that was thirty years ago," Herrera, one of the younger gunrunners, had said. "He's an old man. You can't let him think he can just walk into town and start turning things upside down."

"But that's exactly what he's doing, isn't he?" Drexler, another old hand, had said.

The younger man had sneered. "You're all afraid of him."

"Tell you what." Drexler had taken a swallow of champagne. "If I can get a pin in him, I'll tell you where to find him. If you manage to kill him, I'll be afraid of you." In an aside to Humboldt, he'd added, "Feeding the little punk to Lynch would make my day. On the other hand, I don't know what I'd do if those other guys came around again."

In the spring of oh-four, Miami had been quietly invaded by a group of men who'd beaten the bushes looking for Lynch and any present associates. They hadn't presented credentials, but they'd been well-dressed, well-funded, and well-informed. They'd paid a visit to everybody in Miami who'd ever talked business with the Man in Black, offering princely payments and sinister warnings. But nobody had heard from the man in a year, so it came to nothing. Humboldt still had the number they'd given him; he was sure every man at that meeting yesterday did too, and maybe some of them had been fingering those business cards in the last twenty-four hours.

Humboldt took his tee-off stance and looked down the fairway. "I'm glad to hear you still think of me as someone you can count on, Jack. I'll put together an inventory of stuff our friends might be looking for, and I'll keep an eye out for anyone else with worthy merchandise. I'll leave approaching them up to you, of course," he added quickly.

"Good. But you also need to keep an eye out for people asking questions about why I'm here – strangers especially."

Humboldt rested the head of his club on the ground. "Anybody in particular?"

"Let's just say former colleagues and leave it at that."

Humboldt nodded. "Stay in touch, Jack."

"We'll talk as soon as I've got something to share." Lynch's mouth twitched at one corner. "We're going to make a nice piece of change from this one, don't you think?"

_If the deal is half as sweet as you're hinting,_ Humboldt thought as he watched Lynch walk away, _I'm about to become as rich as Croesus. _He decided to keep Lynch's plans and whereabouts a secret for now. Unless, of course, he could find a way to close the deal himself. But, as he'd told his associates, Jack Lynch was a creature with nine lives. The idea of dropping a dime on him to Herrera was laughable: Humboldt wouldn't even give odds on the ex-FARC's chances. And he didn't trust the mysterious investigators, men with dark expensive suits and identical fancy watches and a manner that shouted 'Agency' to anyone they talked to.

Jack had been spilling blood for at least forty years, since he and his Special Forces buddies had started assassinating Vietnamese double agents for Project GAMMA. Some of the events attributed to Jack Lynch since then – including the Newtown business - still had the old hands speaking his name with lowered voices. And vague rumors drifting around about a new game he was in would have had them shaking their heads in disbelief, if the rumors had been about anyone but Jack Lynch. Even crowding sixty and mostly out of the business, he wasn't a man Humboldt wanted to get on the bad side of; he had a low tolerance for betrayal. There was a story about a forger in Naples named Albrecht who'd crossed the old spook – done something to an associate of Lynch's, a woman, it was rumored, who was a member of a new crew the former (or perhaps not so former) assassin was running. Lynch had paid him a visit, just walked into the man's building past all the guards and other security, and Albrecht had gone out the door on a stretcher – not marked in any way, but paralyzed and unable to speak. No one knew what Lynch had done to him, but then, no one knew what had happened to all those dealers in '87; not one body had surfaced in twenty years.

No, Humboldt thought, he wasn't about to risk spending the rest of his life drooling on his chin for a chance at an extra cut when there was already so much money being served up on his plate. He'd bide his time, protect Lynch's privacy and keep his secrets, and let the old man make him rich.

-0-

Michael's phone chimed on the counter an inch from Sam's head. He didn't even stir. Michael rose groggily from his mattress and lurched over to the counter to pick it up. Automatically, he checked the display and mentally logged every detail about the call that might be important before he connected: his mother, calling at three P.M. on the night she had her girlfriends over for cards. "Mom? What is it?"

"_Good to hear your voice too, Michael._" Madeline Westen sounded mildly annoyed, as she often did when talking to her eldest son. "_You know how I hate to bother you when you're overthrowing governments or whatever, but I thought you might have forgotten your appointment._"

"Appointment?" His mind blanked. A man waving a gun in his face couldn't unsettle him as easily as his mother could with a dozen words, he reflected uneasily. "What appointment?"

"_The poor girl's been waiting for an hour. Do you really mean to say you don't remember?_"

His spine turned to ice. "Mom. This girl. Short, young, light blonde hair?"

"_Well, at least you remember her. Why didn't you tell me she was coming over?_"

"_Mom_. Listen. I don't have an appointment with this girl. What's she doing there?"

Over the phone, he heard a rhythmic beeping noise, followed by Anna's voice. "_Got it, Maddie._"

"_Right now,_" his mother said, "_she's turning a casserole in the oven._"

Fifteen minutes later, he was at the door of his mother's house. He automatically reached back for the Glock at the small of his back under his jacket as he opened the door without knocking. He brought his hand back empty when he saw his mother sitting at the dining table, smoking, while Anna stirred a pot on the stove, her back to them. For once, the appealing smell of good food competed with the odor of cigarette smoke.

Anna said without turning, "Hi, Michael. I can't leave the stove right now, the pudding's boiling."

"It's all right, dear," Madeline said to her as she fixed him with a hawk's regard. "I'd like a word with him first anyway."

"Kay. You like graham cracker crust or Oreo? Either's good for me."

"Oreo, then," she said, as Michael took her wrist and pulled her out of her chair, leading her to the sunroom.

"Mom," he said in a low voice, "tell me everything that's happened since she's been here."

"She showed up at the door with a bag of groceries on each arm. She said she was here to meet you, but she didn't expect you right away. She asked if she could cook something for my ladies' group tonight. You told her about that?"

"No." He watched the girl remove a pot from the stove and dump half a bag of cookies into a mixing bowl. "At a guess, I'd have to say Sam did. Last night." It slipped out before he thought. "Smells good."

His mom took a puff of her cigarette and didn't say a word. She wasn't a universally bad cook, but nothing she made tasted the same way twice. She had trouble following the simplest recipe, refused to measure ingredients accurately, and sometimes made bizarre substitutions rather than run out to the store for something. "I'm sure my girlfriends are going to ask for the recipe. I don't know what I'm going to tell them."

"Did she say anything else?"

"Are you kidding? She never shuts up. The way she goes on about Sam, it's like she's known him since she was a kid. She said she wants to hire you to find a couple of kids. Are you going to take the case?"

"I haven't decided."

"She says they're friends of her stepchildren. Her kids must be almost her age. I can't imagine."

_Fi's right_, he thought. _They're a couple as well as a team._ "What have you been telling her, Mom?"

"Oh, you know, girl talk." She stubbed her cigarette.

"What did you tell her about _me_?"

She grimaced. "Oh, Michael. Everything's not always about you, you know. She seemed very interested in your brother, and we talked about your father a little, and you joining the Army. We talked a lot about living in Florida – she's from Quebec, did you know that? And I told her about all my classes. I think we might go to yoga together tomorrow." She turned to smile at the girl, who was stirring a mixing bowl cradled in her arm, and Anna caught it and smiled back.

"Mom," he said carefully, "this isn't what it's like to have a teenage daughter. They roll their eyes at everything you say and try to sneak out of the house dressed as hookers. They date guys with safety-pin earrings and teardrop tattoos. They don't hang out in the kitchen with their moms and chat while they make dinner together."

His mother pulled another cigarette from her pack and stuck it in her mouth. "You really do think I'm stupid, don't you?" She lit the cigarette and took a puff. "She came here looking for a way to get to you through me. I know that. But I'd bet my life she's enjoying herself in there." She gave him a look that had made him cringe since he was a small boy. "And just because she's used to manipulating people doesn't make her a bad person. Sometimes it's a survival skill, especially if you learn it young."

Anna, pudding-laden tablespoon in hand, came out of the little galley kitchen and rounded the table to join them. Ignoring Michael, she brought the spoon to Madeline's lips. "Taste."

"Uh." The older woman broke out in a smile. "What did you do to it?"

"Vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg. The trick is getting the portions exactly right. Think your lady friends will like it?"

"They'll ask me for the recipe, Annie. For the casserole, too. I'll never get it right. Are you doing anything tonight? Can you stay?"

The girl smiled like sunshine. "Really?"

"Really. We'll teach you to play stud."

"I'd _love_ to. Thank you. Gotta get this in the crust before it cools. I like it with that yummy skin on the top, don't you?" She turned back to the kitchen.

Madeline Westen gazed after her as she brought the last inch of tobacco to her lips. "Help her, Michael."

Michael sat at the table and made polite noises, inwardly seething, while the two women finished preparations. Finally, his mom said, "Annie, I can finish laying the table. Why don't you two go have a talk?"

He led Anna to the sunroom, as far from his mother as possible while still keeping her in sight. Then he turned on the little blonde… whatever she was. He leaned over her, trying to appear as threatening as possible without touching her. "What are you doing here?"

She looked up at him, frank and unafraid. "Jack wants you on this case. I came here looking for a way to sway you."

"Threatening my family's no way to get my cooperation."

Her gaze hardened. "_Threaten?_ As if I'd harm a hair on her head, ever."

The strange answer jarred him, but he pressed on. "Don't come back here, Anna."

"That's between me and Maddie, not you. This isn't your house anymore. It hasn't been since you were seventeen." She turned away from him. "It hurt her to let you go. But she knew you'd explode if you stayed. You were already getting in trouble, the kind that could put you in jail if you got caught. And you were starting to confront your father like a man. That was only going to end one way. So she signed the papers, so you could join the Army and leave her and your brother to face him alone."

The world seemed to tilt. "Leave her? I didn't…" The anger stole his voice for a moment. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"You loved her, but you resented her for not leaving him and taking you with her. Still do, actually. You really ought to get over that." They both watched his mother moving about the tiny kitchen. "Your dad was a lousy parent. He was drunken and neglectful and liked to get physical when he had a few. When he wasn't drinking, he was inconsistent with his rules and uneven with his discipline. You never knew where you stood with him. Nobody did." She folded her arms. "But he wasn't a psychopath or a serial killer, just self-absorbed and self-destructive. He was her husband and the father of her kids. You talked about him to her like you hated him, but you tried to win his love harder than you tried to keep hers."

His jaw clenched. "When I was nine years old-"

She raised a hand. "Stop right there." She turned to him, and all the hot anger at her words disappeared, quenched by the dead cold of her eyes. "You do _not_ want to match childhood horror stories with me, Michael Westen." She turned back to watch his mother. Her voice softened. "I've known her an hour, and I wish she was mine. Don't you tell _me_ growing up with her was all bad. Don't you dare." She left, headed for the kitchen.

Michael bid his mother a subdued goodbye and left. He was in his car before he realized they hadn't talked about the deal.

23


	5. Test of Power

_Keeping the other guys guessing is essential to success as a spy. You try to figure which way your opponent will jump while hiding your motives and tells as best you can, so that he can't get a handle on you: elementary gamesmanship, whether the game is chess or making a deal for nuclear secrets._

_But, no matter how well you think you know someone, he can surprise you, sometimes unpleasantly, if you drop him into a novel situation. This is why you try to control all the features of the game board. One little unforeseen detail, and all bets are off and all rules are cast to the wind. _

Luiz Porteza put his back against the stuccoed concrete wall and panted as quietly as he could while his ears strained for some sound from the man he'd been sent to kill. He didn't think of that man as his quarry anymore; he was under no illusions about who the hunter and hunted were here.

His _patron, _Herrera, had sent Luiz with several others to stake out the house of one of his business rivals, a man named Drexler. But Drexler hadn't been the man Herrera was interested in. Luiz got the impression that Herrera had sent teams to watch at least three more houses, all competitors. They were told to watch for a one-eyed man who might be paying the arms dealer a visit. If they spotted him, they were to keep tabs on him and report back right away.

Luiz, a new man, had been paired with the team's boss, Cesar. While the others watched the fence surrounding Drexler's house, he and Cesar had watched the heavy wrought-iron front gate from a parked car a little way down the street. They'd shot the breeze, eaten junk food and sodas, and read the paper. Several vehicles had come and gone, all big-ticket rides like M-Bs and Lexuses; if one passed by their car, Luiz and Cesar slid down low in the seats until it went by. It had all been routine and boring as hell until, around dusk, a nondescript rental had cruised by, pulled off the street, and put is nose to the gate.

Cesar had lifted the 3X sports glasses to look through the windshield. After a moment, he'd dropped them to the dash with a clatter. "Fuck. One-eyed man - shoulda known." He'd gotten on the phone. To Luiz, sitting behind the wheel, he'd said, "When he goes in, pull down the street and park across from the gate so we can see down the driveway." He'd spoken into the phone. "_Jefe_, he's here. I'll call back in a minute."

The gates had parted and the visitor's car nosed in. Luiz had started their car and cruised down the street, timing it so they'd arrive as the gates closed. Then he'd picked up the glasses and looked down the drive at the rental, which had just stopped at the front door.

A man had gotten out of the car. Luiz had taken a good look and couldn't help being puzzled. Aside from the patch over the cabron's left eye, there was nothing special about him. He was in good shape for a guy on the high side of forty, but Luiz had thought he looked kind of faggoty in his all-black outfit and loafers. "Who is this guy? Personal trainer or something?"

"Shut up. Is he alone?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's something." He'd touched the redial button on the phone and held it to his ear.

Luiz had peered through the glasses again. "Drexler just came out the door. They're shaking hands like old buds. Now they're going in."

"He's inside the house," Cesar had said into the phone. "He came alone. What do you want us to do?" The tension in the crew boss's voice had drawn Luiz's eyes from the glasses. Cesar had listened for half a minute as he'd wiped at his brow and upper lip. "_Jefe_, we only got seven guys here. Maybe we…"

Herrera's voice had come out of the speaker like a cat spitting, Luiz couldn't make out the words, but Cesar had jerked upright in the seat. "No, no, I…" He'd jammed the phone to his ear a little tighter, face blanking. "Okay. Soon as he comes out." He'd snapped the phone shut. "Fuck," he'd said again.

"Who _is_ he, Cesar?"

"You ever hear of John Lynch?" When Luiz had shaken his head, Cesar went on, "Just speakin for me, he's a guy I wouldn't pull a gun on unless I was gonna use it. And once I pulled the trigger, I wouldn't stop till I emptied the clip. But Herrera wants us to pick him up and take him to the boathouse."

Luiz had felt a little chill. Herrera's house was a luxurious estate situated on fourteen landscaped acres along an estuary that was mostly wildlife refuge, very isolated and private. It was also a fortress, the whole property surrounded on three sides by a stuccoed concrete wall ten feet high. The fourth side was accessible only from the water, and closely watched. The grounds were patrolled by a couple dozen men, and the electronic security was state-of-the-art. The boathouse, Cesar had hinted, was a destination for guests of Herrera's who left the estate in weighted sacks. "What do we do?"

"Nothing for now. Go back down the street again."

Cesar had gotten back on the phone and called the rest of the crew with instructions. The team would pick up the one-eyed man's tail when he left the house, force his car over at first opportunity, and pack him into his trunk for the ride to Herrera's.

Half an hour later, the gates had swung open and the rental rolled out. Cesar had gotten on the phone to Herrera, then to the rest of the team, while Luiz pulled out half a block behind and followed.

"Wait," Luiz had said. "Isn't this the way-"

"Yeah," Cesar had nodded, phone poised halfway to his ear. "He's headed straight for Herrera's. Guess he was next on the list." The team leader had visibly relaxed at the prospect.

On Herrera's orders, they'd followed him straight to the estate's driveway while the teams covering the other gunrunners' houses converged there. It had looked like, by the time Lynch pulled up to the gate, there'd be enough men for a football game coming up behind him. The plan had been to use an overwhelming show of force to quell any trouble from this man before it started. Seeing Cesar's unease despite the crazy precautions made Luiz wonder about whether the one-eyed man had an army somewhere nearby.

The plan had gone straight to hell when the sedan had turned into the driveway. It had accelerated full-out and smashed into the stucco gatehouse alongside the wall, taking out the three or four guys waiting inside for their visitor. Lynch had jumped out of the crumpled car like he'd just run over a shopping cart, swarmed to the roof of the wrecked shack, and flipped over the wall into the compound.

The trailing cars, nine of them, had fetched up at the gate. Cesar had screamed, "Open the gates!" Men had moved to the collapsed guard shack, but its controls for opening and closing the gate had been wrecked, and the only other ones were inside the house. The detail boss had turned his face up to the security camera overlooking the gate. "Get these fuckers open!"

The gates had hummed and begun to move, but before they'd spread wide enough to admit a car, they'd stopped. Then the men had heard the first shots, and the faint screams.

They'd entered on foot with drawn guns and split up to search, encountering confusion everywhere. Luiz, still paired up with Cesar, had gone straight to the house. The front door had been standing open, and the two men guarding it were down. The first had been sitting propped against one of the columns that flanked the door; aside from a little trickle of blood coming from his nose, he'd looked okay, except that he was dead as a stone. The other man had been lying across the doorway twitching, eyes staring and blinking like he was suffocating; another of Herrera's soldiers crouched over him helplessly. Luiz was afraid to get near him. But Cesar stepped over him to enter the house, and Luiz followed. Inside, two more men were dead, from bullet wounds this time, and the rest of the house security was running around aimlessly searching, the men jumping at shadows and nearly shooting each other whenever they met. The security office was burning, cameras and alarms offline; no one knew where Lynch was.

"Where's the boss?" Cesar had asked one of the house guards.

"Safe room," the man had replied. "Don't worry about him. We just gotta find this nutcase and put him down."

The lights had gone out in the house, then come back on a moment later as the big diesel generator had kicked in. Then they'd heard a burst of automatic fire and a _foomph_, and those lights had gone out as well. Scattered emergency lighting checkered the estate with patches of light and dark. Luiz had seen men running about the grounds, calling back and forth in shrill voices. Once in a while, Luiz had heard a shot or seen a flash.

"Son of a bitch snuck a team in here," the house guard had said, gun raised, turning this way and that to peer into the dark. "How the hell did he do that?"

Cesar had gathered Luiz by eye, and they'd headed back out of the house. "There ain't no fuckin team," he'd said in a low voice.

Luiz had felt a chill up his spine, like when he was a little kid in church school and Sister Morena had told them stories about the Devil. "He didn't even have a gun, Cesar. I swear it."

"Bet your ass he's got as many as he wants now." The team leader had stopped at the door, thinking; both men lying there had been quiet by then. "Get back to the gate. If he comes through, fade back and call it in. _Don't_ tangle with him by yourself."

Luiz frowned. That didn't make any sense to him. "You sure?"

"You got a problem takin orders, pendejo?"

"No. It's just… seems like the last way he'd wanna leave, the same way he came in. And he'll probably be gone by the time anybody else shows up."

"Just do it. Stay out there till somebody relieves you."

Luiz had taken off down the garden path, moving cautiously among the planting beds and statuary, pointing his gun at every patch of shadow on his route. He'd been halfway to the perimeter wall before it occurred to him that maybe Cesar had just sent his greenest man out of harm's way.

A man had screamed back in the direction of the house, followed by the sound of shots from several guns. The gunfire, Luiz had thought, had a panicked quality to it, the shots too close together for anyone to be taking aim. And there'd been no shouts of satisfaction after it ceased. Whatever the guards had been shooting at, they hadn't hit anything. The commotion had seemed to be moving off towards the water on the other side of the compound. He'd caught himself breathing a little sigh of relief.

A footstep had scuffed the gravel of the walk somewhere behind him.

Luiz had spun and pointed his gun down the path. "Who is it?" After a silent moment, he'd yelled, "Motherfucker, I'm gonna shoot!"

"Knock yourself out," said a strange voice, deep and rough like stones grinding together, the tone unconcerned.

Luiz had fired several times into the darkness. Some little part of his mind had wondered if anyone else could hear the shots, and if they sounded as panic-stricken as the ones he'd heard. Then he'd sprinted for the wall. He hadn't heard anything behind, but that had been even scarier than footsteps fifty yards back would have been. He'd crashed through a stand of bushes, tripped, and almost gone down. He'd put a bullet into the dirt at his feet and nearly lost his gun before he'd recovered his footing and run on.

He'd burst out of the foliage into the grass strip bordering the perimeter wall and nearly run his nose into the concrete. And now, here he was with his back to the wall, peering into the brush and seeing man-shapes in every shadow, trying to slow his heart and catch his breath without making a sound, and wondering which way the gate was. But he wasn't thinking about holding it against this cabron, not anymore. The whole guard force hadn't been able to bring down this guy, and whatever he'd come to do, Luiz was pretty sure he'd already done it. Luiz wasn't going to stop him with a Glock and half a clip. The smartest thing, the only thing to do, was to get to the other side of the wall, out into the street, and be gone. Come back a little later, and claim he'd been searching the grounds. Any other course was suicide. _Cesar wanted me out of the way,_ he rationalized. _I'm just following orders, sort of._ He spotted the white strip of the driveway twenty yards off to the left and turned that way, jogging down the grass as quietly as he could.

The gate was shut.

He grabbed one of the bars and pulled as hard as he could. It didn't budge. He hadn't really expected it to; a dozen men hadn't been able to move them earlier, when they'd been trying to get their cars through. And Cesar had told him once that the gate would hold if somebody crashed a truck into it.

He looked it over, panic rising. The gate was ten feet tall, like the wall. The uprights were slender steel rods, pointed at the top to resemble spears, held together by equally slender crossbars at top and bottom. They looked flimsy and ornamental, but Cesar had told him they were made of the finest steel, the sort banks lined their vaults with. They were spaced too close together to slip between. It didn't look like it would be easy to climb, but he was running out of options.

Luiz stuck his gun in his waistband, then jumped up and barely caught the top crosspiece. But the only other crosspiece was at shin height, and he couldn't pull himself up from full extension with just his arms. He dangled a moment with the uprights digging into his knees before he gave up and dropped. He looked around for something to drag to the wall or gate to stand on, but there was nothing.

_Back into the brush_, he thought. _Find a hole to hide in. He's leaving. Let him pass by, like the Angel of Death from church school_. It occurred to him that the one-eyed man was trapped inside just as he was, but Luiz suspected that the wall wouldn't stop him any more than Herrera's gunmen had.

A tapping noise at his feet caught his attention. He looked down at the pavement and froze. A yard away, a grimy Styrofoam cup blown in from God knew where was tumbling and spinning lazily on the same square foot of pavement, as if caught in some weird crossdraft. But Luiz couldn't feel or hear a breath of wind. The cup took off towards the grounds, bouncing, and vanished into a patch of blackness like an open maw. Chest tight, Luiz drew his gun.

"Do you have a spare mag for that, or are you down to -"

Luiz fired into the black hole in the shrubbery. The weapon clicked dry much sooner than he'd thought, surprising him and turning his blood to ice. He dropped the weapon and slowly raised his hands.

"That looks like my answer. Put them down." Luiz was surprised to realize that the man was speaking Spanish, and in the hard clipped accent of a _Habanero_. "You tried to kill me with every bullet in that gun. Raising your hands once it's empty doesn't mean a thing to me." A pause, then: "What's your name, son?"

"Eh?" Luiz had been struggling to compose his mind for death. "What?"

"Your name. You have one, don't you?"

He remembered Sunday school again, but this time it was the whispers of the other children after classes. _If you tell the Devil your name,_ an older boy had said, _it gives him power over you. _"Why should I tell you?"

The clack of a gun's slide broke the quiet. "Think about it. I'm sure a reason will come to you."

Luiz swallowed. "Porteza. Luiz Porteza."

A moment of silence. "Where are you from, Luiz?"

"Colombia."

"I could tell that from your accent. Besides, almost all of Herrera's boys are. What part?"

"San Andres. Putumayo."

"Hill country. I'll bet half the people you know work for the cartel."

"It's all the work there is."

"Is that how you came to work for Herrera? I know he sold drugs as well as guns."

Luiz nodded dumbly, very aware of the man's use of past tense. "A friend of my brother worked for him."

"You like Herrera?"

"I never met him."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty." He swallowed. It wasn't easy; his mouth felt like it was full of dead leaves. "Why are you asking me these things? Why, why don't you just…"

"Think of this as a job interview, Luiz. You're between jobs right now, after all. What did you do for Herrera?"

"I helped with the shipments. I stood guard sometimes, but mostly I moved crates off the planes and boats and trucks."

"This is your first taste of strongarm stuff, then?"

"Yeah. The Chief put every man he could spare on watching the other gun dealers' houses."

"Ever kill anyone?"

"I seen plenty of dead people."

"Not what I asked."

"I could if I had to."

"'Had to.' I like the sound of that."

That statement confused him enough to ask a question. "Why?"

"Because you're a twenty-year-old _sicario_-in-training who still hasn't found a good enough reason to take a man's life. That tells me there's a chance you never will."

Luiz decided to risk another question. "You knew. How?"

"You people aren't very good at stakeouts. There were only three cars parked on the street around Drexler's, and only one within sight of the gate. Instantly suspicious. When I drove by, I'll bet you ducked down on the seat when you saw me coming up. But you left all your junk on the dash – empty wrappers, binocs, all the giveaway stuff. And you really should have rolled the driver's window up. Nobody parks a car around here without locking the doors. A couple of pointed questions to my friend Drexler, and I knew Herrera was my target."

_Target? A man like Herrera, not a threat, just something to sight on and take out with a well-placed shot?_ "The guard, he said the Chief was in the safe room." Luiz wasn't quite nerved up enough to ask the question directly.

"It wasn't safe enough. Not nearly. Luiz, do you have any money saved?"

"What? No. Not really."

"Why not? Didn't Herrera pay you?"

"He paid me enough to buy a house back home. But everything's expensive here, and… I'm the new guy. Every time we stop to eat, or go to a bar at night, I have to pay. They said it was tradition, and the next man hired would take his turn. But I don't think the old hands save any money either."

"Probably not. It's not that sort of career. All right, Luiz. Do you want a job?"

"What would I have to do?"

The man's voice lowered. "Did you ask Herrera that question before you signed on?"

"No. But I sure should have." Luiz waited, hardly breathing, not knowing whether he'd just pissed the man off, expecting a bullet with every breath.

The deep voice huffed, the shortest of laughs. "Sounds like you learned that lesson about thirty years younger than I did. Nothing that will trouble your conscience."

Luiz nodded. "Okay."

Lynch emerged from the darkness as if surfacing from a black pool, taking form in an instant. Luiz decided the black clothing and light soft shoes didn't seem faggoty anymore. The man had darkened his face with something, streaking it to break up the lines of his cheeks and forehead and nose. "Here. Let's put you on the payroll." He tossed something to Luiz.

Luiz checked the impulse to duck and caught it. It was a money clip thick with bills.

"Eleven thousand, about." Lynch stepped to the gate and made a stirrup of his twined fingers. "Over the gate now. Do you have a key?"

"Key?"

"To the car you came in."

"Oh." Luiz felt in his pocket to be sure. "Yeah. The dark gray one."

"Good. I don't have much practice hotwiring ignitions, and I'm sure not leaving in the one I drove here. I'm just glad nobody thought to move a car up to hold the gates open."

A suspicion dawned. Luiz remembered the smoke coming out of the security office. "You shut the gate. In case he tried to get out this way."

"Good guess, but short of the mark. I opened it, too."

"You let twenty more guys with guns inside?" Luiz stopped a step from the man's hands.

"Twenty untrained men running around in the dark shouting and shooting just added to the confusion, and it got them away from the cars." Lynch gave him a hard look; it was all Luiz could do to meet the one-eyed man's half-dead stare. "Are we doing this or not?" Luiz stepped into Lynch's hands, and was surprised when the man smoothly lifted his feet to shoulder height. "Over you go. Mind the points."

Luiz got a foot on the upper crosspiece and dropped heavily to the pavement on the other side, almost going to his hands and knees. He turned to face the man in black through the bars. "Now what? How are you…"

In answer, the man stepped on the lower crosspiece, jumped, and grasped the upper one. Then he reversed, putting his back to the bars. He jackknifed, legs straight out, looking like a gymnast doing a stunt, and sent them over the top of the fence feetfirst and backwards. Still gripping the crosspiece, he straightened his arms, allowing his chest to just clear the points as it followed his legs over the top. His feet thunked into the uprights on the other side, and he dropped to the pavement facing the gate. He landed on the balls of his feet, flexing his knees slightly, bounced backwards a couple feet, and stood at rest. "Dammit." He turned towards Luiz while looking down at a tear in the front of the black shirt. "Wife sees this, I'm never gonna hear the end of it." He looked up at Luiz. "Give me the keys."

"I can drive."

"No, you can't. I'm leaving without you."

Luiz stiffened, thinking the man was going to kill him after all.

Lynch plucked the keys from his hand. "Go to wherever you're staying. Don't spend an extra minute there, just pack. Don't get in touch with anyone you worked with here. Go back to Columbia, but not back home; you're a city boy now, and going home might raise questions you shouldn't answer. Find a job, one where saving for retirement makes sense. Find a girl and settle down."

Lynch examined the car, and the ones behind it. He got in, started it, and reversed hard , crumpling sheet metal and moving the cars behind him a couple feet, then pulled forward and ran the car into the gate. Then he reversed onto the flowerbed bordering the drive. He spoke to Luiz through the open window. "Raise a family and live a quiet, honorable life. That's what I want you to do. I'd give you more starter money, but it's all I have, and you don't have time to wait for more. Be out of the country within twenty-four hours."

Luiz clutched the pack of bills and glanced through the bars of the gate at the driveway leading to the house. It was still dark, but the shooting was over, and he thought he heard boat motors burring down the channel and away: men, many men maybe, leaving because they no longer had an employer. "Why are you doing this? A man like you. Why not just kill me too?"

"Maybe I bagged my limit," the man said, too lightly. Then he must have decided to give a better answer. In a heavier voice, he said, "Or maybe I saw I didn't have to, and after forty years of this shit, it's not fun anymore. Or maybe you resemble my youngest son a little. Or maybe it's just because I can." He glanced behind, as if ready to back down the planting bed, but turned back. "One more thing. The girl. Get one who can cook. A girl who's a good cook is likely to have other useful talents." He backed the car down to the street, turned, and disappeared.


	6. Truth Extraction

_Many of the people you deal with in the spy business are rulers of their own little kingdoms. Covert cells in the field have to run with almost no oversight, to keep their members secret and their actions deniable, so they're made up of individuals who know how to think fast and improvise and hold teamwork in high regard. So long as such groups produce results and don't get their superiors in trouble, they run their networks as they please. In such autonomous groups, personal loyalty up and down the chain of command is essential, and close personal relationships among its members common: they become like family. Infiltrating a group like this is next to impossible._

_But that same clannishness can sometimes be turned to advantage. Such groups, having found a dynamic and techniques that work, are slow to change. Their leaders become predictable. And they can be maneuvered through their people._

"Well?" Fiona, sitting in the passenger seat of Mike's Charger, lifted her binoculars to study the building across the street. "Are we going to finish yesterday's discussion, or are we going to let it fester some more?"

Michael stirred restlessly. Sometimes he hated stakeouts with Fi, especially in the confinement of a vehicle. If there was nothing happening to draw their attention away, the forced intimacy led to some very uncomfortable conversations that he couldn't walk away from. "Fi, I'm not going to rip the guy off because he's rich, or because you don't like him. I've kept guns out of IRA hands too. So has Sam."

"I'm not talking about ripping him off. I'm talking about charging all the traffic will bear. He said he's used to paying top dollar. This job could put us in the black for months." She kept the glasses pressed to her eyes, scanning the lobby through the big first-floor windows, even though the crews had all gone in and there was nothing left to see there. "Maybe enough for a long vacation somewhere."

_With you. _"Somewhere I can get by car? I'm still on three no-fly lists. I probably couldn't even take the turnpike without getting pinched."

"And maybe our new super-spook friend might do something about that, too. He doesn't seem to have any trouble moving about, even with half the cops on the planet looking for him."

"I'll price the job according to the work and expenses and risks, okay? I'm just feeling my way around right now." He turned his attention to the windows of the four-story office building. There was something happening on each floor; Corteza used big crews that worked with little supervision. Michael watched the men and women briskly wiping down blinds and windowsills, emptying wastecans, dusting shelves. He admired their work ethic. Immigrants often worked with a will, either from early habits, or gratitude to their sponsors, or buying into the American Dream – or sometimes fear. That last didn't seem the case here; there was too much smiling going on. These people enjoyed the work and the company.

"Did you notice them passing the security desk?" Fi dropped her glasses. "The guard checked all their IDs. Doesn't that seem odd if the same people come in every night?"

"Yeah." Michael turned his glasses on the big glass first-floor windows facing the lobby, and the security desk just inside. The uniformed guard was taking his job seriously, fiddling with the views on the monitors. Michael couldn't see the whole desk, but the portion he saw was clear of newspapers or thermos bottles or any of the other stuff a man on boring solitary duty might bring to the job. He studied the man's uniform shirt, and thought he saw creases that didn't come from laundering, as if it had come straight from the package. "He's new."

"I suppose the turnover on a job like that is pretty high. The pay can't be much." Her binocs lifted to the windows. "How many of them are here illegally, do you think?"

"That's what Corteza does. Most of them, I'd guess."

"They'd need ID that would pass casual scrutiny, then. Some of them drove to work, too."

Which meant that their IDs would have to be good enough to pass police scrutiny as well. "We may have a way around Corteza, then."

-0-

Sam said into the phone, "What do you mean they don't exist?"

"_I mean,_" his ladyfriend at the local cop shop said. "_That there's no listing for those numbers in any database I've got access to._"

He tapped a finger on the countertop. "What database wouldn't a police detective have access to?"

"_Well, I wouldn't necessarily know, would I? I'm sure the CIA has people who don't want old friends looking them up. Other agencies too. Witness Protection, maybe. Sorry, Sam, it's the best I can do._"

"That's fine, Cory. You gave me plenty."

"_Enough for dinner and dancing?_"

"As soon as my girlfriend dumps me." _Which won't be long, if I keep standing her up and neglecting her._

"_Hmph. Coming from any other guy, I'd be insulted. But I'll be expecting a call if she does._"

_You'll probably have somebody living with you by then,_ he thought. _Women like you don't stay on the market long._ "You didn't try the numbers?"

"_And screw up your investigation? Fat chance._" Cory knew Sam was ex-FBI, another reason she helped him from time to time. He'd dropped a few names in conversation, and she'd gotten the impression that the Bureau still contacted him for odd jobs off the books. He didn't correct that impression.

They chatted a little longer, then Cory got back to work, and Sam got a beer out of Mike's fridge. He was alone in the loft after dark again, Mike and Fi being off at a stakeout checking out another of Corteza's housekeeping crews. Sam thought it unlikely that Corteza would let the kids be that easy to find, but they couldn't be sure without checking.

He got out a pad and the slip of Anna's notepaper with the three phone numbers on it. He copied them, putting them in sequence. They were identical except for the final four digits: 0001, 0002, and 0004. On a hunch, he retrieved the envelope Lynch had given Mike, and went through the cash and photos until he found the business card. Lynch's number was the one at the top of Sam's list. It seemed obvious whose the second one was, but who had the third?

He got out a phone directory and flipped to the national map of area codes. The numbers' three-digit prefix didn't appear on the map, or on the chart of international codes.

He pondered his next move with the full bottle beginning to warm in his hand. Then he punched in the third number, noting that his display blanked as soon as he touched the send key. It rang five times, and he was sure it was going to disconnect or go to voicemail, but then it clicked. "_Hello?_" A young woman, not Anna. Dance music thumped in the background, echoing. "_Roxy…_"

"_Got it, Kat._" A much younger female, probably the purple-haired teeny from Anna's photos. The music volume squelched down.

"_Better. I almost didn't hear the phone ring. Hello?_"

Sam's brain got busy; he doubted this conversation would last long, and he needed to glean as much information as he could. The teeny was 'Roxy', the girl on the phone was Kat – either the tall top-heavy redhead in Anna's photos or the slinky dark girl. "Um, hi there," he said, trying to sound embarrassed and confused – and hopefully, make the girl feel helpful. "Think I've got the wrong number."

"_Who is this?_" Her tone changed instantly from casual to intent at the sound of his voice. _Strangers don't call this phone._

He cleared his throat. "Sorry. I was calling Jack, but I got fat fingers, and all your numbers are so close together, you know? I'm Chuck. Chuck Finley?" As if she might know his name.

"_How did you get this number?_" The tone of voice told him it had better be good. He had just about decided from the resonance of her voice that he was talking to the redhead; she just _sounded_ big.

"Anna gave it to me, for emergencies I think. She showed me your picture too. You're a very pretty girl, pardon me for saying." That would be true whether he had guessed wrong or right. He glanced at his watch: nine P.M. During the course of their alcohol-lubricated conversation, Anna had referred to six 'o clock as her 'regular dinnertime'. "Oh, jeez, look at the time. I'm calling right in the middle of dinner besides. Sorry."

"_It's okay. We-_" A pause. "_I have to go now. Do you have a message or something?_"

_Bingo. Three-hour time difference. West Coast. _"No. I'll just call him at triple-oh-one, if I can put my finger on the right button this time. Nice talking to you, Kat."

After he disconnected, he checked his call log: as he'd expected, it showed no activity since his conversation with Cory. He sat at the counter with the phone near at hand, sipping his beer and waiting for the call he was sure would come.

Before the bottle was empty, his phone chimed. He checked the display: blank. He connected. "Hello, Mr. Lynch."

Lynch said, "_Care to explain?_"

_While I have a chance?_ "Just checking my information and my sources. Being suspicious of strangers doesn't come easy to Kat, does it? Nice kid."

"_I thought I made it clear it was a bad idea to get too curious._" The man's tone was mild, but the hair on Sam's forearms rose anyway.

"We're not mooks, or bird-dogs either. We don't take jobs just for money."

"_People who follow a cause are often misled, Sam. Money doesn't lie to you._"

"But it can make it easy to lie to yourself, Mr. Lynch."

A moment of dead air. Sam thought he heard traffic noises, as if Lynch were driving. "_Point taken. But the risk you're taking snooping around is very real – to those kids and your friends both. You don't want to draw attention of that sort. There are people who'd pay any sum you'd care to name for what you already know about us. Or, if you declined, commit any act to persuade you. Don't dig any deeper than your conscience demands._"

"In that case, why not just answer a few questions, save me all that risky digging?" He lowered his voice. "Who are you working for, Mr. Lynch?"

"_If we're going to get cozy, Sam, you should call me Jack._" Another pause. "_I'm working for myself these days, but I'm sure that's not what you're really asking. One reason I need to be cautious is that I didn't leave on good terms with my former employer._"

"You weren't burned."

"_Not the way your friend Michael was. A spy organization that other spy organizations don't know about can't issue burn notices. Besides, my cover and some of my activities were still useful to them. But management discredited me thoroughly at The Shop, to deny me any support from my old associates._"

Sam had never heard of an intelligence outfit that called itself 'The Shop'. CIA was referred to as 'The Company' by the Cold Warriors who still walked its halls, and the FBI was 'The Bureau', and the other ones he knew about pretty much got by with their acronyms, with the occasional reference to 'The Department' or 'The Agency' tossed in. "Were you working for them in 'eighty-seven?"

"_I've been working for them since CIA dropped me on the curb in 'seventy-eight, but they've been around for longer than that. They've done some very good things that I'm sure you've never heard about. But they've been operating without oversight for a long time, and for the past twenty-odd years, they've been drifting into some very crazy stuff. I quit in 'oh-four under a very dark cloud, and I've been avoiding them ever since. If they ever get a pin in me, I'll disappear just like those gun dealers and Jimmy Hoffa."_

"Uh…" Sam blinked at the sudden rush of information. "The kids. The ones living with you. They in the same kind of trouble as the ones you're looking for?"

"_The same, but more so, which is one reason I keep them close. Don't ask me about that, Sam._"

"Why not?"

"_I won't tell you. Even if you believed me, it wouldn't make any difference to the job, and it would put you and your friends in__more danger than you've ever known._"

"I've had people trying to kill me with a good chance of success. Danger doesn't get any bigger than that."

"_I need to let you go now, Sam. I'm about to pay a visit to an old associate, and it looks like someone's staking out his house._"

Sam's grip on the phone tightened. "Cops?"

"_If they were, I'd fear for the public safety. No. We'll talk later._" The phone disconnected. Sam didn't bother to look at the call log.

-0-

The cleaning crew for Dunleavy Securities filed through the building's glass front door around midnight. Gustavo, the crew chief, noted a stranger sitting in place of the half-buzzed kid who usually manned the lobby's security desk. That wasn't unusual, but the replacement seemed a little funny. His uniform was new, but he didn't look like a typical newbie. Fresh recruits were usually either kids right out of school or retired cops. This guy looked to be mid-thirties, either too young or too old to be a new hire. He had all his hair and teeth and looked presentable and in good shape, the sort that the security company preferred to put in public view during the day. So it seemed odd that he'd be stuck manning the security desk on graveyard shift. "Where's Devon?"

"I dunno," the guy said. "They just called me in." He stood up. "Hold it. Where do you think you're going?"

The crew chief frowned and looked back at the men and women crowding in behind him in their coveralls and gloves and ID badges clipped to their shirt pockets. "Are you kidding, man? We're the janitor service."

The new guard frowned. "Nobody told me nothing about a cleaning crew."

"That's cause we're here every night."

"Oh, yeah?" He gave the mostly-Latino group a suspicious look. "Well, maybe you're not the real cleaners. Maybe you're here to clean it out a different way, huh?"

The group stirred. Gustavo took a breath and pushed down his temper; he trusted his people, and doubted any of them would even take a soda from an office fridge. "Man, this is a broker's office. What do you think we're gonna do, steal the 'Salesman of the Year' awards?"

"Maybe you're spies." The guard's eyes brightened at the idea. "Yeah, industrial spies. You can get a lot out of wastebaskets and stuff. I saw it on TV."

Now Gustavo understood why this guy couldn't find a better job: he was an idiot. "All that stuff gets sent to the shredder before the end of the day. Every office has a little safe in it for confidential stuff. Unless you think we're a gang of safecrackers too."

The guard seemed to be considering the possibility.

"Look," the crew chief said, "if you don't let us in, the office manager's gonna come in in the morning and wonder why the offices didn't get cleaned. And you can bet _my_ boss will tell him."

The guard reached a hand towards Gustavo. "Let's see some ID." When Gustavo tipped the badge up towards him, he said, "Not that. I mean real ID. I made better fakes in high school."

"Maybe you should have been studying instead," Gustavo muttered in Spanish. He reached into the slit in the hip of his coveralls and awkwardly reached his wallet. He brought it out with some effort and extracted his driver's license. "See? Same as on the badge."

The guard took it in hand and studied it like it was a page of quadratic equations. Finally, he stuck it in his own pocket. "Okay. Next."

"Hey! Gimme back my fuckin license, man!"

"Security deposit. You can have it back when you leave. That way my ass is covered." He gestured towards the others. "Come on, all of you. Drivers' license, green card, whatever."

The others stilled. "It's okay," Gustavo said quietly in Spanish. "He can't do anything with them but hold them."

Arturo, a big kid new to the crew – and the country, Gustavo presumed – looked scared. He spoke in Spanish as well; Gustavo didn't think he knew much English. "You're sure? Dom said they were good, but-" He fell silent at a squint from the crew chief.

Maria, a cute little thing who'd been on the crew for a year, eyed the guard with a frown. "I don't like this, Gustavo. If he can't do anything with them, why does he want them in the first place? What's he going to want from us to get them back?" Maria sometimes had trouble with late-working males looking for a little 'extra service', presumably to be delivered in a closet or washroom.

Nina, an older woman who'd been on the crew longer than Gustavo, shook her head, studying the guard with flat dark eyes. "It's all right. He's not after that. He's just worried about his job." Her lip twitched. "And maybe having a little fun pushing us around. He probably doesn't get much chance to tell other people what to do, and I bet his thing is no bigger than his thumb." That brought a few chuckles, and eased the tension somewhat.

The guard was looking them over, waiting. Gustavo had become practiced at guessing how well a gringo could understand Spanish, even when they were trying to pretend they couldn't; he was sure this one didn't get a word they were saying, although it shouldn't have been hard to guess. "Just give him your ID. If he doesn't give them back, we'll kill him and stuff his body in the trash chute."

The guard's expression didn't change at all. He just stood there with his palm up, waiting.

After the crew had given up their licenses and other ID, and the elevator doors had closed on them and the car started up, Michael spread the documents on the desk, took out his camera, and began photographing them, front and back.

He had just finished when a man appeared at the door, tapping angrily on the glass. The raised lip of the desk hid Michael's work from view; he gathered the camera and ID's up and put them out of sight before he left the desk.

He approached the door and studied the man on the other side: tall, Latin, hawk-faced. Well-dressed in a suit and tie at half-past midnight. Mid-forties, but in good shape. Black hair in a widow's peak. Michael spoke through the door. "Can I help you?"

"Open the door, please." The man's tone made it a command rather than a request, with no doubt whatsoever that Michael would comply.

Michael went back to the desk and found the button that unlocked the door; it opened with a loud click, and the man pushed through. But he didn't head for the elevator. He marched straight to the desk and said, "All the identification you extorted from my people. Give it to me now."

"Now wait a minute, I…"

"_Now_. Or Dunleavy will be choosing between you and them tomorrow, and I'm very sure who they'll prefer to let go."

Michael pretended reluctance as he bundled up the cards and passed them over. "Just trying to do my job."

"Then you don't know what your job is. I'm going up to give these back. It's up to you, but I wouldn't be around when they finish and come back down." Corteza marched to the elevator, stabbed the button, and glared at the doors until they opened.

Michael was out the front door before the elevator reached the first floor. From his car, he called Fi.

"_You're done early_," she said."_Did it go all right?_"

"I got the IDs. And I ran into Corteza. I see why Lynch got nowhere with him. He guards his people like a pitbull."

"_Hm. Good for his people. And good for us?_"

"Yes. We're getting closer."

-0-

Forgers don't hold conventions or print a quarterly newsletter. Most forgery outfits are one- or two-man operations. A forger may take the occasional apprentice, but the only schools for falsifying documents are run by government agencies, and they keep a close eye on their alumni. Most free-lancers are self-taught. It's a solitary profession.

It's also a highly competitive profession. Forgers have to stay ahead of advances in document security; those who don't get caught or put out of business. Their customers are always looking for the best work, since second-rate is worth less than nothing. So, even though forgers don't rub elbows, the successful ones study each other's work, and can often examine a fake document and figure out who created it.

"Henri Dusseau," said the little man Barry had introduced at breakfast as 'the guy who does my paperwork'. He nodded over the photographs of the IDs Michael had taken. "Came here from Marseilles maybe fifteen years ago. He's real good. If you're looking for somebody local who does small jobs, and you had a cop run this and no bells went off, it's got to be him."

"If you spotted his work so easily," Fiona said, "How does he fool the police?"

"That's why I'm sure it's him. Not a lot of people around here can do perfect replicas of common U.S. documents, but some. But only Dusseau's got people in the DMV and Dade County Records."

Michael leaned over the man. "Where can we find him?"

"Don't know. He's a ghost. He's got a small client base, people he's known a long time, and he only does business with them or people they refer. If you know somebody who uses him, have them put you in touch."

Mike and Fi traded a look. "That's not going to work. I don't suppose you have a name or two?"

The man shook his head. "Sorry. In this line of work, your client list is something you hold closer than your technique."

"Well," Michael said, "we'll think of something."

12


	7. The Race is On

_Kicking a man in the crotch is a very chancy move in a fight.__Yes, it hurts. A lot. And it often causes permanent damage. But it isn't physically disabling, and it dumps painkilling endorphins and a cocktail of fight-or-flight chemicals into your opponent's system. A man who's been kicked in the balls and is still standing is insensitive to more pain, and ready to kill._

_A kick to the kneecap, on the other hand, is a very effective strategy. A broken knee hurts too, but a man with a leg that won't support his weight is at a serious disadvantage, no matter how juiced he is. You can close in and finish him with little risk, or run - your choice._

_Striking at a man's pride may give you some satisfaction, but striking at what holds him up and keeps him stable gives you options._

Roger Humboldt stood on the green six feet from the cup, lining up his putt. He wasn't optimistic about his chances of sinking it; it hadn't been that sort of day. He was six over par on the tenth hole, his worst game in months, and was almost ready to throw his bag into the cart and head for the clubhouse.

He knew what was fouling his concentration, of course. News of Herrera's insane act had reached him via Drexler last night, and the predictable outcome of the unequal contest had been on the local and regional network news by noon. Speculation on those news channels about the mysterious attack had run the gamut without coming close to the truth. Humboldt had made and received a number of calls, assuring his contacts and associates that the matter was settled and over, and not the start of a turf war. Although, he thought, Herrera's absence would leave an opening in the Central American market that someone was sure to fill…

He swung his club gently in front of the ball, just a practice swing, idly wondering what Lynch was up to now - visiting some more gun dealers, perhaps. If so, Humboldt was sure the Man in Black would find a warm welcome and a receptive audience; even the radicals who had earlier made noises about 'putting the old man in his place' were sounding much more reasonable now that video from Herrera's estate was hitting the news channels. It would have been amusing, except that Jack Lynch frightened Humboldt as well.

The sound of motors intruded on his thoughts. He frowned down at his ball. The tenth green was as far from a road as one could be; there should be no cars near enough…

The sound grew louder. He raised his head and saw a large black boxy vehicle – a Chevrolet Suburban, he realized – coming toward them at a jogging pace down the fairway in uncaring disregard of all rules. He glanced at his nearest bodyguard and, over the man's shoulder, saw another vehicle bearing down on them from a different direction. He turned and saw a third and fourth, covering every escape route.

One of the guards slipped a hand into his coat; the other stepped toward the golf bag for the Franchi stashed there. Humboldt studied the vehicles' purposeful yet unhurried approach over the lovingly tended grass, which spoke of a disturbing sort of authority. "Wait," he said. "Let's see what they do next."

At ten yards' distance, the vehicles turned and circled, rather like Indians surrounding a wagon train. But they stopped as soon as they were all broadside to the three men and closing them in a ring of steel. Humboldt looked at the dark-tinted windows and the deep impressions of the tires, and was suddenly sure the vehicles were armored.

The doors on three of the vehicles opened. The men who stepped out, four to a vehicle, were all of a type: big, tough, and young, in reflective sunglasses and expensive suits. Humboldt the gun dealer recognized tailoring intended to conceal body armor and holsters. They stood by their vehicles without drawing their weapons, staring the three men down silently from behind their shades. Their manner was patient and disciplined in a way that spoke of unit training, very different from the wary restraint of his bodyguards. Humboldt's hired hands were mercenaries; these men, he thought, were more like soldiers in some secret army. He watched the fourth vehicle, whose doors remained closed, and waited for the man in charge to make his appearance.

After a pause, the fourth vehicle's doors began to open. The rear passengers were like the others, but the driver was a fortyish black man with a bit of gray in his hair and moustache, but fit and hard. He straightened his tie as the car's rear-seat occupants took position near the still-closed front passenger door and its dark glass. The black man rounded the vehicle and opened the door, and Humboldt swallowed his surprise. The man in charge, it appeared, was a young woman, chestnut-haired, slim, and attractive. She was dressed in a feminine version of what her men wore, right down to the shades, and when she stepped away from the vehicle, they formed up on her in a manner more appropriate to subordinates than to bodyguards. This was borne out when the little group closed to within a few steps of the arms dealer. She made a small hand motion, and her entourage halted and let her approach alone.

When she was just at arm's length, she stopped, facing him. She pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and tipped her face up to look at him. She had dark brown eyes and a dusting of freckles on her nose, and looked far too young to be in charge of a pack of wolves like this. She would have been adorable if not for the cool menace in her eyes.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she spoke first. "Please don't waste my time with obvious questions. You know who we are and what we want."

"I was about to express my surprise. I half expected Lynch to step out of the car."

Her eyebrows rose. "Now?" The three men immediately behind her turned their heads slightly, scanning their surroundings.

"Figure of speech. Haven't seen him in years." He glanced around at the silent men. "They just seem like his kind of people."

"He's traveling with a team?"

"I said I haven't seen him."

The girl's eyelids drooped. "All right. Are you going to start cooperating right away, or do I need to threaten you first?"

The agents surrounding Humboldt didn't move, but something changed, as if imminent violence ionized the air or something. His bodyguards' hands drifted towards their sidearms. He remembered the army of gun dealers who'd disappeared twenty years before._ Will the police come looking for me in an hour,_ he thought, _and find only my cart and clubs and some tire marks in the grass?_ He licked his lips and said, "There must be a hundred potential witnesses on the grounds. You could never be sure someone's not watching. And people will be looking for me."

She studied him a moment. "Roger Humboldt," she said as if she were a sixth-grade teacher addressing a boy in the back row, "do you see anybody on this course besides us? Anywhere?"

Feeling cold, Humboldt looked between the trees towards the eleventh tee, then at the seventh-hole fairway. Both were empty. The club, located on an artificial island in Biscayne Bay, was exclusive but well-used; you could always see other golfers on a temperate day. And sounds from the rest of the course usually carried if one listened: carts whirring down the paths, the _whack _of club striking ball, the occasional 'fore'. But there was no one in sight, and no sounds but birdsong. "You can't…"

"I've lost count of the times I've heard those words. Spoken in the same tone. You didn't have a clue we were coming. Did you." It wasn't a question. "No heads-up from your handler at the Agency or your 'friend' in the state AG's office. No dead-drop message from your ATF mole. And even after we visited police headquarters this morning, none of the local cops on your payroll left word at the little bar on Fassett Street. When we rolled through the clubhouse gate, you didn't even get a phone call from the old codger who mans the gatehouse. And if we let you call the clubhouse right now, no one would answer. Does all that suggest something to you?"

It suggested a great many things to the gunrunner, foremost that he was out of business at this woman's whim. Even if she didn't make good on her threat, these people knew enough about his operations to shut him down permanently. _How could they know so much? I've been as careful as anyone. If they have all this, why haven't they done something with it?_

Then it occurred to him that they _were_ doing something with it.

She was watching his face. She must have seen what she was waiting for; she nodded. "You didn't get any warning because they're all more worried about our displeasure than yours. It's not that we're 'getting away' with something; smart people just know better than to throw themselves under our wheels." She lowered her voice. "We can do anything we want here, Roger. Anything."

He glanced again at the men surrounding him, waiting for the first of them to draw. Or would she do it herself?

"That's the least of your worries right now," she said, as if guessing his thought. "I'm sure you'd rather be dead than broke and in prison." From an inside pocket of her jacket, she produced a gadget that looked like a very fancy phone, or a top-end handheld, with a wide color screen and an alphanumeric keypad. She slid the screen up with a thumb, revealing another keypad underneath, one whose buttons bore unfamiliar markings. "We know the CIA makes use of you from time to time, of course, but I kind of like upsetting our cousins at Langley. I can push two buttons on this, and ten million dollars in unreported income will be transferred from one of your numbered overseas accounts to the NRA's PAC fund. It'll set off more alarms than an inbound ICBM." She touched one button. "Deutsche Bank, do you think, or Bank of Singapore? Singapore, I think. No reason to make it _too_ easy for the IRS to trace." She turned the device around. The little screen displayed all pertinent data on his secret – and guaranteed secure – account: twenty-digit account number, client ID number with his real name beside it, access password and special transfer instructions, and present balance to the penny. She turned it around again and looked at him with her thumb poised for the second keystroke.

Humboldt's mouth opened all by itself. "Don't."_ Who are these people? What U.S. intelligence agency has this kind of power? Or… are they even government agents?_ He swallowed. "I saw him yesterday."

"Who was he with? A little blonde pixie?" her voice lowered. "Or maybe a tall redhead, a centerfold type?"

"He was alone. I've never seen him with anyone like that."

"What did he want? Why is he here?"

"He's… putting together a deal." He quickly assessed the chances of that deal going through now that these people were on the scene, and added, "A big one. With Cuba." _Sorry, Jack. It was a beautiful dream._

She stared silently up into his eyes, as if looking for something. "That's all?"

The world seemed to shift a bit. "He's talking about modernizing Castro's army. A billion-dollar deal, at least."

She looked about to say something, paused, and changed her mind. "When will you see him again?"

"I have no idea. He contacts me when he needs to discuss something."

"Why did he kill Herrera?"

"Herrera was going to kill him. He saw Lynch as a rival."

Again that look from her, as if she was trying to decide if Humboldt knew more than he was telling. The fancy phone was still in her hand; he tried not to look at it.

Her thumb moved to another button and pressed down. Humboldt's heart went into his mouth before he realized she'd canceled the transfer. She slipped the device back in her coat and produced a business card, which she flipped to the ground at his feet. "In for a penny, Roger. Otherwise, just think what he'll do to you when he finds out you talked to us." Then she turned without another word and started back towards her car, her men following. The others began to get back in their vehicles.

-0-

Just before they reached the Suburban, the black man said in a low voice, "Got your bitch on today."

"I didn't like the way he looked at me, Curtis," the woman replied, her voice equally low.

"Ferris, every guy we meet looks at you like that."

"The first time." She stood at the door, waiting.

He reached for the handle. "Think he'll pick up the card?"

"Depends."

"On?" He opened the door.

She settled into the seat and swung her legs up, waiting to be shut in. "On whether he's still got the one from four years ago. If he already has the number, he might put on a show for his men. Keep an ear on his phones, and an eye on his Internet traffic."

"After what you just showed him, you really think he might drop Lynch a line?"

"Never underestimate the depth of human stupidity, Curtis. Especially the stupidity of a man who's afraid."

-0-

Humboldt watched the black vehicles form up and head in single file for the road. They were halfway there when he dropped his club and picked it up again, grasping the handle with one hand atop the other to stop them from shaking.

The guard who handled the bag looked at him. "You're not paying us enough." The other guard bent, reaching for the card at Humboldt's feet.

"Leave it," the gunrunner said. "Put the bag in the cart. We're out of here." He headed for the cart, taking small steps like an old man.

The guard straightened and followed. Behind them, the first guard picked up the card and tucked it in his pants pocket before reaching for the bag's handle.

-0-

Sam nodded to the man sitting across the table from him, picked up his cellphone - carefully, since it was connected by a slender cable to a laptop in front of the other man – and punched in Lynch's number. Before he hit the send key, he turned it around to show his companion the display, and let him watch it blank as he connected.

The phone picked up on the second ring. "_Sam, I hope you're not calling to resume our last conversation._"

"Mr. Lynch. I'm calling to tell you we're making some progress. I'd rather not go into details-"

"_I'm not that sort of client, Sam. What do you want to tell me?_"

"We're going to need some extra manpower. I know you want people in the know kept to a minimum. Rather than bring someone new in, I was wondering if you could spare your girl Friday for awhile."

"_What do you have in mind?_"

"A con, sort of. We need someone to masquerade as a government agent."

Lynch's voice lowered. "_What kind of government agent?_"

"Details, Mr. Lynch."

A moment of silence. "_She's excellent at undercover work, and I'm sure she'd be glad to help. Her schedule is very flexible right now. Give her a call._"

"I don't have her number."

"_I'm quite sure you do. Anything else?_"

"Not just now."

"_All right then. Call me if you need to, anytime._"The line went dead.

Sam said to the other man, "Well?"

Spencer Watkowsi was a former client, an encryption expert with a genius for discerning patterns in seemingly random data. When he was on his meds, anyway. When he was off them, he was even better at drawing connections between seemingly unrelated events, but sometimes his theories involved alien invaders masquerading as humans. He'd deduced the presence of a burned CIA agent living and working undercover as a PI in Miami from a few newspaper clippings and a little research, even being able to figure out where Mikey would be at a given time so that he could meet him. He'd turned them on to a series of murders that had turned out to be motivated by greed rather than global conquest. Spencer was working for a tech firm now, under a good doctor's care, and mostly adjusting well. Mike called on him from time to time for a little side work.

Spencer stared at the screen. "I don't have a clue how he's doing it."

"Come on. He must be encrypting the transmission somehow."

"Oh, he is. Really good job, too, nothing I'm going to break with a laptop computer. Give me a team and a mainframe and time, and maybe. But that's not the impossible part. It's the software." He shook his head. "I can't begin to figure out how he's using the system while keeping the computers that direct the call and connect it out of the loop. Unless-" He looked at Sam over the screen. "Who is this guy?"

Sam said carefully, "He used to be a spy."

"Obviously. But what agency? DIA? They're the telecom spooks. Though it seems obvious to me the DEA has a very sophisticated eavesdropping program, too, better than any of the U.S. military-intelligence outfits."

Sam didn't ask what dots Spencer had connected to reach that conclusion; some of the boy's logical steps seemed anything but logical. "Ever hear of an outfit called 'The Shop'?"

Spencer thought a moment. "No. But the name implies that it's small and close-knit." He tapped the screen. "But powerful, with access to top-secret stuff. That means money."

Sam nodded. "He's rolling in it."

Spencer stared at the screen. "Are you sure this is a U.S. agency? They're not from somewhere else?"

"Spencer…"

"Another country, I mean, not another planet. Do you know where the term 'black ops' came from?"

Sam frowned at the abrupt change of subject. "What?"

"From Congressional budget applications. See, every dime the government spends ends up as a line item – so much for this, so much for that. But they're public records. So when the military or the CIA or whatever asks for money for something secret, they ask one of the Select Committees for approval first, and then that item shows up in the public record as a code number with a heavy black line covering the description – a 'black project'."

Sam nodded, knowing Spencer had to explain things his own way, even if it took an hour afterward to figure out what the hell he was talking about.

The MIT dropout gave Sam a little smile. "But the code numbers weren't generated by an encryption program, they're assigned by bookkeepers for easy reference - which means that you can usually figure out from the number what the money's for –pigeonhole it, anyway. That's how I know the U.S. has had an SDI network in orbit since the late Eighties. It isn't capable of dealing with a Russian first strike, but it would work just fine against a retaliatory second strike or a rogue-state launch. That's what really toppled the Soviet Union, see. They-" He caught himself. "Sam, this outfit isn't getting its money from the U.S. government. Everything that big is accounted for. So they're an agency of a foreign power or self-funded."

"Assume self-funded," Sam said. "Where would the money come from?"

"Well, they've got access to a first-rate computer research facility working under government contract – or thinks it is. That's the only way to explain having this kind of tech and not developing products for market with it. They're keeping it secret for their own purposes. I'd guess cybercrime."

"Like what?"

He shrugged. "Too many possibilities, not enough data. Blackmail. Industrial espionage." He grew animated. "Maybe skimming money from secret accounts. If they have IT this good, there's no place they couldn't hack into, I bet. But _why_? What do they want?"

"Come back to Earth, Spencer."

"I'm taking my meds like clockwork, Sam. I know we're not surrounded by alien invaders. But the patterns are still there." Spencer looked up at him. "Every day, there are things going on all around us that powerful people don't want us to see."

-0-

Madeline Westen exited the school building where her yoga class was held, her little blonde companion trailing behind her. "Annie, are you sure you've never done yoga before?"

"Never. It was fun."

"Fun. It took sixteen classes for me to get into that position. You're limber as a snake."

"It was a great stretch. Thanks for inviting me. And to the card game last night."

Madeline stopped and fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes. "About that. We need to talk."

The girl's sunny tone cooled, grew cautious. "What about it, Maddie?"

Madeline reflected on the previous evening's game. She and her sexagenarian girlfriends, Irene, Debra, and Sylvie, had set their new fish at the table, explained the particular brand of poker they were playing, walked her through a few hands until they were sure she understood the basics – and then set about to clean her out of her hundred-dollar stake as they chatted and ate.

Only, it hadn't exactly worked out as planned. Madeline would have bet anything that Annie really didn't know how to play at first, but she picked up the game with scary speed, and it soon became clear that the girl was eerily difficult to bluff. If the cards hadn't come from Maddie's own drawer, she'd have wondered if they were marked. By the time they'd finished with Annie's casserole and started on dessert, it had looked like the little pixie would be leaving four hundred dollars richer.

But then the conversation had shifted to Sylvia's husband. He had chronic pulmonary ailments, and the insurance company had begun getting sticky about paying for the expensive treatments and prescriptions. They had no legal grounds for refusing payment, and they didn't; they just kept throwing up paper roadblocks that delayed payment and had the doctors dunning Sylvie and her husband for their money.

"They're hoping you'll just get tired of it and pay, and then you'll be forever getting reimbursement," Irene had said. "Every day they hold back is a day they can make more money on what they owe you. And maybe Al will die first, they think, and they won't ever have to pay at all."

"The doctors will wait for their money, they know we haven't got it." Sylvie's lips had thinned. "The pharmacy won't. It's getting hard to scrape together a car payment after I fill scrips." She'd looked down at the card-strewn table. "I really shouldn't be throwing away money on cards."

"Oh, you know better than that," Maddie had said. "You win this week, you lose next week, it all comes out even. You're not spending any money."

Shortly after that, the game had changed. In the course of an hour, Maddie, Deb, and Irene had been tapped out by their new player, until only she and Sylvie remained. Sylvia had been ready to throw her cards in too, but Annie had stopped her with a tone that brooked no argument. "Let's finish it out. Last man standing, and all that."

The game had gone back and forth for another hour, with Annie winning a hand or two, then Sylvie, but somehow the pots were always bigger when Sylvie won, and at the end of that hour, most of the cash had been on Sylvie's side of the table. Annie had looked put out. "I don't get it. I was doing so good before."

"I was thinking the same thing," Maddie had said in a low voice that no one else had heard.

Annie had reached for her purse. "What say we raise the stakes?"

Sylvie had looked down at the wad of money in front of her, almost five hundred dollars. "I don't know…"

"Come on," she said. "Give me a chance to make my money back." She'd pulled a bank packet of twenties from her purse and opened them up. "I feel my luck coming back."

An hour later, Sylvie had won two thousand dollars.

Another hour later, she'd won ten thousand, every cent on the table, and, presumably, in Annie's purse. Maddie watched her old friend wobbling between elation and guilt, and knew she was thinking of giving the money back.

"Whew." Annie had grinned and shaken her head. "I'm out. Looks like my luck came back, alright, and settled on you instead. Now I know how people get addicted to gambling."

"Annie," Sylvie had said, "I don't think-"

"Don't you dare offer it back. You won it fair and square, and you taught me a valuable lesson. I'll never trust to luck again."

Now, outside the school with her gym bag in one hand and the little clutch holding her cigarettes and lighter in the other, Maddie said, "What happened last night had nothing to do with luck."

"I can afford it, Maddie," the girl said quietly. "She wouldn't have taken it any other way."

"How you blow your money's your business." Madeline lit up and took a puff. "What are you doing here, Annie?"

"I'm looking for-"

"I don't mean that. Why are you standing here at my elbow with a brand-new gym bag in your hand?" She took another puff. "Michael's already on the job. What do you want with me?"

Annie swung her bag in front of her, holding the strap with both hands, and looking about ten years old. "I've got some free time, and I'm new in town, and I don't know many people. Does it have to be any more complicated than that?"

"Can the little-girl act, sweetie. I raised two devious boys. They were good at looking innocent, too."

The girl lifted the bag into her arms, as if hugging it. "See, that's the problem with being a little schemer. Nobody believes you when you're sincere."

"That's not working either." Maddie dropped the half-finished butt and stepped on it. "Am I some more of your charity work? Are you thinking I need a more dutiful child or something?" She folded her arms, trying to appear stern. "Michael and Nate aren't storybook sons, Annie, but they're good ones. We have a lot of issues to work around, but they love me, and they keep in touch, more or less, and they'd do anything for me. I know plenty of people down here whose kids wouldn't know if they died unless somebody told them."

The girl's mouth hardened. "I understand that perfectly. My mother doesn't know I exist, and I like it just fine that way. The man who created me was evil with a capital 'E', and the world's a better place with him gone."

_Now, that seemed sincere, _Madeline thought._ 'Created'. What an odd way to put it. _"So what's that got to do with me?"

"Nothing. I just like you, Maddie. I like spending time with you."

"You like spending time with a sixty-year-old woman you barely know. This is Miami, Annie. The beaches are full of people your age to make friends with."

Annie shook her head, not looking at her. "There's nobody my age, not anywhere."

Despite her resolution not to let herself be manipulated, Maddie's heart softened. "All right. Sorry. I'm sure I sound ungrateful and suspicious. I guess my firstborn's rubbing off on me."

"I like your firstborn. And I like his friends, even Fi. I bet I'd like Nate if I met him." The girl sighed and stepped towards the car she'd picked Madeline up in, a red convertible. She popped the trunk and tossed her bag in. "I just… I don't know many normal people."

Madeline scoffed and tossed her bag in as well. "If we're your idea of 'normal'…"

Annie's cellphone chimed. Madeline noticed that she, like Michael, studied the display and paused to consider a moment before answering. "Sam?"

-0-

Curtis Monroe, at the wheel of a rental car instead of one of the team's custom vehicles, wheeled onto the huge parking lot of the vacant big-box store not far from the city center that the team was using for a command post. He circled to the rear of the big building to the auto-service center and tapped his horn. One of the big doors rolled up, revealing an empty bay, and he pulled in between a pair of black Suburbans. He was out of the car before the door rolled down, and entered what had been the sales floor. His footsteps echoed in the bare empty space as he headed for the enclosed area that had once been the store's offices.

Ferris Mars looked up from the laptop on her castoff desk as her team leader approached her makeshift workstation. "Anything?"

He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the folding chair opposite her computer desk, revealing a black pistol in a shoulder holster. "Do you have any idea how many hotels there are in Miami? As well as rooms and apartments and houses to rent? That's if he's not staying with someone he knows." He sat and rested and ankle on his knee. "Our computer geeks could search most of these places for us in seconds, if we were looking for anybody else."

"We can't trust the results of a computer search."

"I know. But we only brought twenty men. We'd need lottery-winner luck to locate him this way."

She looked down at her screen. "Concentrate on the fancy places, then. He's not fussy about where he lays his head – hell, he doesn't sleep for days at a time – but if he brought one of the Cheerleaders with him, I bet he'll make sure she's comfy." 'The Cheerleaders' was the Shop's unofficial name for the four young females presently under Lynch's wing, the ones whose faces appeared on the 'Queen' cards of the deck every man on Ferris's team carried. "I'm thinking about the business with Herrera. Why did Lynch risk our attention with such a showy killing, and for no apparent reason?"

"You don't buy the self-defense story Humboldt gave you?"

"Humboldt is a dupe. Lynch isn't here to sell guns. And he didn't feel threatened by some tinpot gunrunner. He was sending a message. But what, and to who?"

"Whom."

"Correct my grammar again, and I'll shoot you in the foot."

Curtis scoffed, smiling. "There are people who'd believe that, you know."

"There are people who should." She glared at her screen, as if willing it to give up information. "We've been about a step behind him for half a year now, arriving at places he or his people have just left. What are the chances he knows we're here and looking for him, do you think?"

"Pretty good. He can't believe we'd miss -" Curtis's face blanked. "He _wants_ us chasing after him. That's why he's been popping up all over town, showing himself to people who've got our number. He's leading us. Into a trap?"

"Maybe. Or maybe, he's trying to lead us away from something. The Specials we've caught since the breakout have told us how he scattered the group all over the country and hid them. I've been wondering if he got in touch with any of them after he turned them out. Maybe, instead of trying to chase Lynch down, we should be trying to figure out where he's headed." She ran fingers through her hair. "Damn it. He knows too well about our manpower constraints; he used to be Director of Operations, after all. We're just spread too thin." Ferris's mouth set. "I'm going to have to talk to the Director."

17


	8. Finders Keepers

Sam, dressed once again in a suit and tie – the most conservative and expensive he owned - stood at the curb, leaning against his parked rental car, and tried to look casual as he waited for Lynch's babe-assassin to join him. He was beginning to have second thoughts about recruiting Anna for this part of the job; she seemed ill-suited to leaning on people. He knew she was a lot more dangerous than she looked, but in this case that was going to be a handicap; she needed to _look_ intimidating. Fi would have been a much better choice, he thought, but Corteza's receptionist had already met her. Corteza had met Mike. There were other people they might have used, but Michael didn't want to involve anyone else. Anna was the last and least.

A woman exited the building. Sam, ever appreciative of the fair sex, appraised her automatically. She was dressed in dark slacks and jacket over a white shirt open at the collar: business attire, but flattering and probably expensive, something a successful lady lawyer or broker might wear. A pendant stone the size of his thumbnail flashed at her throat. She carried a strapless purse that was just big enough to hold a thick paperback and had probably cost more than Sam's car. Short hair, a brown so dark it was almost black. Eyes hidden behind trendy shades, but with an oval face and a nice mouth painted a shade of red that was stylish and just this side of tasteful. About five-six, trim figure, thirty-five or forty if she was a gym rat. She walked with a long stride, but kept her arms close to her body and swiveled her hips to keep her upper body stiff as she bobbed along: kind of sexy and purposeful at the same time. A nice package, but a boardroom bitch, he was sure, too aggressive and prickly for his taste.

The woman walked right up to him and said, in an almost man-deep voice, "You didn't stare at me like that in the restaurant. Am I more your type now?"

Sam started. "Anna?"

She tilted her shades down to regard him with a cool smile. Her blue eyes were now medium brown, and done up in a way that made her look older and on the market. "That good, really?" She tipped the shades back up. "Well, 'Charles', I'd say we're ready to pay a little visit to Mr. Corteza then, wouldn't you?"

He found himself opening the door for her. He glanced down as she turned to sit, and saw that she was shod in thick-soled shoes, platforms almost, with heels that raised her another four inches. After she swung her legs into the car, he shut the door and got behind the wheel. "How did you do that to your voice?"

"Acting lessons." Besides being almost man-deep, it was a little smoky as well: sexy, in a Lauren Bacall – Kathleen Turner kind of way.

He pulled away from the curb. "You understand the plan?"

"Such as it is." She turned away from him, looking out the passenger window. "We pose as a pair of agents from the mysterious organization that's hunting Jack and the kids."

"Mysterious to one of us, anyway."

She ignored the comment. "We give him the typical good-cop-bad-cop routine – not because it'll work, but because he'll expect it. You take good cop, Charles. I'm sure you'd be more convincing. We shake him, and see if he drops anything or runs."

He nodded. "Okay, you know my game name. What do I call you?"

"Ma'am." She gave him a chilly smile. "The bad cop should be the one in charge, don't you think? Makes the threat more credible."

"Think you can pull it off?"

"I've been riding herd on five headstrong teenagers for three years. Believe me, I can be intimidating."

"Okay. Are you good with a gun?"

"Depends on the gun."

"Did you bring a gun?"

She kept her face to the window, studying the street. "Hardly. That's what I brought you for."

He frowned. "What?"

"Sorry." Her voice was normal again. "Just trying to sink into my role as a queen bitch. I'm a method actor, Sam. Jack says the truly intimidating people don't carry guns. They have other weapons."

He opened the center console compartment and removed a Glock Seventeen. "Yeah, well, take it and stick it under your coat then. In case we push him too far, and your attitude impresses him less than it does me."

She smiled at that, but shook her head. "Leave it there till we're out of the car. I want to check it over before I carry it."

Twenty minutes later, Sam called Mike as they rolled up on the cigar factory, a one-story block structure the size of a small grocery. "We're here."

"_I can see you._" Which was Michael's way of saying he was here without giving them his location. "_Any trouble?_" Which was Michael's way of asking if Sam's new partner was going to work out.

"Nada," Sam said. "Smoother than I expected."

"_All right. We've only got one shot at this, and we need a quick reaction, so push hard._"

"Right." He disconnected. "Okay. Let me do the talking at first. When I touch my lapel, you step in and give him the final push." He parked the car a few spaces from the entrance.

She nodded. "It's going to be fun working with you, Sam. I'm very glad you all decided to help us."

"I really didn't think Mikey was going to take the case. If I had, maybe I would have let you bribe me."

She lowered her lashes. "With a million dollars?"

He returned her serve. "Why not? I've had a woman. I've never even _seen_ a million dollars."

"Pfft. It doesn't look like much. A million in twenties will fit into a gym bag."

"That sounds like experience talking." He rounded the front of the car and opened the door, then stood with a hand on the top of the window, shielding her from sight as she pulled the Glock from the center compartment. "And what if I'd taken you up on your other little offer?"

"You wouldn't." The corners of her red-painted mouth turned up in a Mona Lisa smile. "The French have a term: _savoir jusqu'ou on aller trop loin. _'Knowing the point to which you can go too far.' You understand?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. Flirting's about pushing at the boundaries. You can go a little past what's proper, and you're naughty and interesting. Go too far, though, and you look cheap and dirty. Turn-on becomes turn-off."

The smile widened to dimples. "Oh, a ladies' man, for sure." She turned her attention to her pistol, ejecting the magazine and checking the load. "I know you were never going to sleep with me, Sam; not for fun, and certainly not for payment. I'm not your type. But letting you know I was thinking about it made _you_ think about it, and sort of made you guilt over taking advantage even though you didn't. Same way with the money. Offering you a million dollars for your help would have guaranteed I'd never get it. But _betting_ you a million on an impulsive wager made you feel protective and proprietary… the same way you feel towards your clients." She pulled back the slide.

He shook his head. "Played."

"Don't take it hard. I'm good at it. I have natural advantages and lots of practice. And you know, I really do think you're sweet. I'm never going to leave Jack, but I'm not going to throw away your number, either. If it's okay, I'd like to give you a call from time to time." She stuck the weapon, still cocked, under the back of her coat and into the waistband at the small of her back. "Ready," she said, voice deep again. "Shall we?"

He reached the building's door first and pulled it open, holding it for her. She pulled off her sunglasses and walked into the office with one hand covering her eye. "Dammit. Lost my contact." She approached the secretary's desk at the other end of the small reception room. "Where's the bathroom?"

The woman indicated a door behind the desk, next to the one leading to Corteza's office. "Through there. May I ask-"

"No." Anna turned to Sam. "I'll be just a minute. Don't go in without me." She leaned over the desk. "Don't announce us until I'm back. Or you and your boss will both be very sorry." She disappeared through the door.

The secretary rested her hands on the desk, one atop the other, almost as if she were making a show of her compliance. Her eyes fastened on him. Sam returned the stare. "If there's a knee or floor switch under that desk," he said, "I wouldn't touch it." They stared silently at each other until Anna returned.

Sam's companion stepped back through the door, but, instead of rounding the desk to join him, she stepped to the adjacent door and inclined her head. Sam moved towards it. The secretary started to speak, but Sam said, "We're going in now. He doesn't have any business more important than us."

Corteza's office was nothing special, a wainscoted space fourteen feet square with a terminal on a heavy wood desk and one chair, but it was clean and tidy. The only pictures on the wall looked like family photos, but maybe that was just because the people in them were all Hispanic. Sam spared the walls only a glance before focusing on the man behind the desk, who looked just as Mikey had described. Corteza said in an unwelcoming voice, "Can I help you?"

Anna settled into the chair facing the desk, crossed her legs, and watched him without speaking. Sam approached the desk. "Funny you should ask." From his jacket pocket, he pulled a five-by-seven photo, the only shot he'd managed to take of Mike's meeting with Lynch before the little blonde had put his face in the dirt and stolen his camera. It showed Barry and Mike, seated on opposite sides of the table, with Lynch standing between them. Michael was facing away from the camera, but Barry's unease as he looked up at Lynch was evident even through the long lens. "Tell me about the men in this picture."

The coyote pretended to study it. "I don't know any of them."

Sam touched Lynch's image. "You know this one. You work for him."

Corteza's eyebrows rose. "I'm self-employed. If he buys cigars from me, that makes him my customer, not my boss. And now I think I'd like to see some identification, if you please."

"I'm not talking about your front organizations," Sam said, brushing aside the demand. "This one, or the cleaning service staffed by illegal immigrants. We don't have any interest in them, either, unless you prove difficult." He tapped Lynch's image again. "This is who we're looking for. This man is an international arms merchant with a lot of cash and very bad reputation who's a known opponent of Castro's regime. I'm sure you know all this, and know that he's in town. You may even know where he is now. You may not know that he's putting together a _very_ large weapons purchase. And, apparently, a team. This man …" He tapped Mike's image, which showed only the back of his head, "is a former CIA agent of some repute living in Miami, who's rumored to still be in the spy game freelance. The rabbity-looking individual is a go-to guy for moving large amounts of ill-gotten cash. And our mutual friend has undercover agents in the Latino community, we think gathering intel to facilitate Lynch's recruiting process. Add it together, and you have an international incident in the making." Sam tapped the photo against the other palm. "Things are very unsettled in Central and South America right now. Castro is urging the OAS members to repudiate billions in loans from American banks, drug cartels are the de-facto governments of half a dozen countries with Caribbean coastlines. Chavez is trying to organize a sort of OPEC West to force local oil prices up. The DEA's Project Colombia just got uncovered, and pictures of whole villages dying from Agent Orange overspray are all over the news. America's reputation in this hemisphere is pretty tattered right now. The very last thing we need is another Bay of Pigs disaster."

"This has nothing to do with me," Corteza said with wide nostrils.

"It might not, except that you're providing covers for his agents here."

"_What?_"

Sam gave the man a tight little _gotcha_ smile. "Two people, a young man and woman he sent to you three years ago. You've been hiding them ever since. What we can't figure out is why he hasn't visited them since he's hit town." Implying that Sam already knew where they were and was watching them.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your friend Dusseau says different, and he should know, shouldn't he?" Before the shock of that revelation fully sank in, Sam reached into his jacket again and pulled out a pair of fake Florida IDs made from chin-up crops of the kids' photos. He flashed them at Corteza. The way the man's face turned to stone told Sam everything. "These two. Mind you, we have no interest in them per se, but we'll gladly use them for bait. And if Lynch doesn't meet with them soon, we'll just pick them up and see what they know."

For a moment, the soft whir of the fan in Corteza's computer was the only sound in the room. Then the man gathered himself. "I don't know any of the people you're talking about. The story you tell me sounds like something from a badly-written book. I don't know who you are, but you seem the sort accustomed to working in shadows. And you can be sure that any attempts to harass my employees will be brought under a very bright light. If you have nothing more to say …"

Sam carefully hid his disappointment. He'd shot his quiver, and Corteza had been rattled but not moved. If the coyote delivered a warning to the kids, it would be well-planned and probably too subtle for Westin and Company to track; he had decades of experience keeping people out of sight, after all.

"I think we've wasted enough time here." Anna spoke for the first time, startling both men; they'd almost forgotten she was in the room. She stood. "I told you he wouldn't listen to you. Maybe when INS comes to his factory tomorrow and hauls his whole shift away, he'll be more receptive."

Corteza's voice was stiff with outrage. "You can't do that. They're all legal. Some of them are citizens. Naturalized."

Anna reached into her purse and pulled her phone from her purse, pretending to be consulting it. She stared at the coyote with shark's eyes. "Mr. Corteza, I don't care if they're native born. I can make their citizenship disappear like smoke in the wind. And I will, by this time tomorrow, if you don't give us Lynch. Then I'll go to work on your housekeeping crews. Then your friends here, and all their relatives. Your neighborhood will look like Times Beach before it was bulldozed. And none of them will be permitted on U.S. soil again." She pressed three buttons and put the phone to her ear. "If that doesn't convince you, I'll start playing dirty. You have family here, and in California, and in Texas, I believe." She watched Corteza's eyes tighten, and a little smile touched the corners of her mouth. Sam thought that if anyone, man or woman, had ever looked at him like that, he'd be stepping back and reaching for a weapon.

"You leave those people alone," Corteza said tightly. "They haven't done anything. They don't even know what I do."

She tapped the phone against her cheek. "You know, I'm feeling inventive. It's _so_ easy to set Latinos up for a trafficking charge these days. It isn't even a challenge. But a terror cell, say, using drug money to finance their plots… I'm sure there are still a few empty cells at Guantanamo. I wonder how your brother and nephews will take to daily waterboarding. And if the North Valley Cartel is led to think your sister's husband and father-in-law are setting up a network without its permission, it'll burn their houses down with their families still inside. Come along, Charles." She turned her attention to the phone as she headed for the door. "Special Investigations, please. Agent Dwyer's office." She passed out of sight.

Corteza turned to Sam, eyes wide and searching. Sam dropped a card onto Corteza's desk. "She means it. Think it over. But not for too long." He added, "Sorry."

Back in the car, Sam said, "Damn. Hope I haven't just seen the real you."

"Not in a million years." Anna deposited the Glock in the center console, then opened the glove box, found a fast-food napkin, and vigorously scrubbed the lipstick off her mouth.

"Then you must have been channeling Adolf Eichmann."

"Not him either." She wiped the heavy eye shadow from her lids. "The Executive Director of IO."

"IO?"

"The Shop's real name. You don't need to know what it stands for, and knowing wouldn't tell you anything, really."

"But it's run by a woman."

"That's one descriptive. She's been called plenty others." Then she said to the windshield, "Once in a great while, I call her 'Mom'."

He put that aside to think about later. "How did you know about his family?"

"You didn't see the pictures on the wall? A lot of family resemblance. It didn't take much to figure out the relationships, and the locations. Corteza's a family guy, big time."

"Think he'll agree to set your boss up?"

"Absolutely not. My guess is he's on the factory floor right now, dismissing his workers and telling them to run, and to warn the others. As for the kids and any others he's keeping under cover, he won't go himself or use his phone. He's smart as well as principled. I see why Jack likes him. Stop here. I don't want to get out of range."

"Range? What-" He pulled the car to the curb. "You bugged him."

She nodded. "One under the edge of his desk. Another under his secretary's. A third in the ladies' room, which is also the women's locker room." She appeared to be listening, though Sam couldn't see a plug in her ear. "Nothing from his office, no surprise. He's gone into the secretary's office. No talking, but I hear a scratching noise, probably writing down instructions. Suspicious sort. Now she's leaving the room. So's Corteza." A pause. "Sam, do you speak Spanish?"

"More or less." He and Fiona both did. Michael didn't, which the two of them ribbed him about often, asking him how much good his fluency in Russian and Farsi did him in Miami.

"Listen, then." He thought she was going to hand him an earpiece. Instead, she began speaking in two voices, both of them Spanish, as if she were reading a book aloud: "_Frida, what's going on? Is it a raid?_"

"_I don't think so. Gangsters, maybe._"

"_I'm scared. There was a story on the news about some big gangster getting killed last night, right in his own house. We're not mixed up with those people, are we?_"

"_Mr. Corteza? Of course not."_

"_What are you talking about in here?" _A third voice.

"_Ramona,_ y_ou're his secretary. You've been with him for years. Have you ever heard of gangsters coming in here to threaten people?_"

"_Whatever's going on, Mr. Corteza will make it right. He always knows what to do. He'll call us all back to work in a few days, I'm sure. Right now, he says to scatter and stay with relatives for a while. Do you have someplace to stay?_"

"_At my cousin's in Fort Pierce, with my husband. What about you?_"

"_Orlando, maybe. I haven't decided._"

"_Ramona, where are you going? Aren't you coming to the bus stop?_"

"_I have to run a little errand before I go home to pack. Try to have a good time with your cousin, Esme._" Anna looked at him. "Get all that?"

"Every word. That was pretty slick." He pulled the car away from the curb, U-turned, and parked on the opposite side of the street, pointed back toward Corteza's.

"What did they say?"

He turned from the windshield to stare at her. "You don't speak Spanish?"

"Not a word. But I remember what I hear."

"Guess so." He called Mike.

"_Go ahead, Sam._"

"Corteza's on the move, along with all his people. Just like we thought, he's not taking any chances with them. We've got a bug in his office, picked him up writing a note to his secretary without saying a word, and now she's off on an errand for him."

"_That he didn't want overheard. Warning the kids?_"

"Best guess. He thinks we know where they are, and we'll be picking them up once we see he's not going to cooperate. She's Hispanic, forty or so, in a dark skirt and a red sweater."

"_I see her. I'll let Fi follow Corteza._"

"Wait," Anna said. "What's she wearing on her feet?"

Sam caught her suspicion and said quickly, "Mike. What kind of shoes does she have on?"

"_Low heels, pointed toe, red with something shiny across the top._"

She shook her head. "Brown squared-toed flats."

Sam repeated the information, and a few moments later, Mikey said, "_Got her. She's wearing a jacket with the hood up, but the shoes are right._"

-0-

Michael sat at the wheel of his black Charger, looking through his sport glasses at the back door of the cigar factory and the bus stop at the end of the walk. He was parked in an empty lot strewn with broken brick half a block away, peering through a gap in the tall weeds that lined the edge of the property on two sides. He watched the woman in the hoodie seat herself on the bench, both hands on the purse in her lap.

Michael's biggest worry had been that Corteza would instruct the secretary to phone his warning. But the woman's cellphone stayed clipped to the strap of her purse. Corteza didn't trust the phone system, Michael speculated, or maybe the kids just didn't have a phone. Corteza's message was going to be delivered face-to-face.

A bus rolled up to the stop, blocking his view of the bench. Mike tensed. When the bus rolled away, the seat was empty. Instead of immediately starting the car and pulling out into the street after it, he sat for a moment, assessing Corteza and the secretary's caution and paranoia. He took his hand off the ignition. Ten minutes later, the woman reappeared at the factory door, without the hoodie, and hurried to the bench just as another bus rolled up, again blocking Michael's line of sight. He started the Charger and rolled into the street as the bus pulled away from the empty bench.

_Following someone riding a bus sounds easy. Buses move at a deliberate pace, seldom outrunning traffic, and they make frequent and scheduled stops.__Every turn is mapped out, literally, and often their route meanders all over a relatively small area. Which is exactly why tailing someone on a bus is so hard to do without getting made, if you're working solo and not as part of a team. Usually the best method, if your subject doesn't suspect he's being followed, is to get on with him, not trail him in a car. But most of the riders on a bus route are regulars who recognize one another even if they don't speak, and they tend to pick the same seats every day, which makes it easy to notice a stranger if you're looking. If your subject does suspect he's sharing his ride with a tail, he can make you or shake you just by getting off and back on. So you follow in a car, staying well back to take advantage of the bus's high visibility, and try to pull to the curb behind cover every time it approaches a stop. Not ideal, just the best you can do with what you've got._

Michael put wishful thinking aside and concentrated on the bus as it slowed to a stop a block ahead. The stop was crowded, and it was possible the secretary might get off unseen in the press if he wasn't careful. He pulled to the curb and looked over the tops of the parked cars in front of him, watching the doors as they folded back. Three passengers got off, none of whom matched his quarry's description. He relaxed a moment and lowered his glasses as the waiting pedestrians began to board.

Then an idea hit him, and he brought the binocs to his eyes again, attention focused on the people climbing the steep steps into the bus. The fourth boarder was an athletic-looking young girl with short blonde hair, sort of a mullet. He couldn't tell eye color, but they were light. He reached above his visor and pulled down a pair of pictures clipped there. A glance confirmed his guess: Jocelyn Davis, one of Lynch's quarry.

Sam's researches had found a match for the two kids, but Michael wasn't sure how much of what he'd dug up could be trusted. They hadn't been kidnapped, it seemed, but had faded quietly from sight, beginning four years previously: no articles on their disappearance in hometown papers, no police reports. They'd lived five states apart, children of ordinary people with ordinary lives, with no indications that they'd ever met. But Lynch had said they were the children of friends, and Anna had told Sam that they were classmates of the youngsters now under Lynch's wing. Michael, a man who'd been turned from a hero to a villain with the change of a few lines of type on an official document, thought the public record looked to have been altered to broom out the kids' tracks. Where they'd been the past few years was something he wouldn't know unless he asked them.

He called Fi as the bus pulled into the street. "The secretary is meeting with the girl on a city bus; I'm guessing it's one she takes home from work every day, which is why Corteza knew she'd be on it."

"_Need backup?_"

"Not yet. I'll call after I've followed her home, and we'll see her together." Michael was sure the girl would feel less intimidated by a strange couple come calling than a strange man, and might need that reassurance after the dire warnings the secretary was probably filling her ear with. "What's Corteza doing?"

"_I'm pretty sure he made me a while back. Now he's leading me all over North Miami. I'm guessing you went south?_"

"Coral Way. A white girl and Hispanic boy together wouldn't raise any eyebrows here."

The bus wound its way through streets lined with mature trees and elderly but well-kept buildings. It made frequent stops to load and unload passengers, and Michael watched carefully. Sometimes he couldn't find a parking space, and was forced to creep along the street as if looking for an address. If it had been him on the bus, he'd have spotted the tail long ago. He hoped the two women he was watching weren't so observant.

The bus turned into a business district of sorts: a double row of two- and three-story brick buildings, mom-and-pop operations with storefronts on the ground floor and apartments above. The bus stopped once more, disgorging a larger-than-usual number of people. Just before the doors closed, the blonde girl pushed her way out and hit the street, hurrying down the sidewalk away from him.

Michael lost a minute parking and locking the car, by which time she was out of sight. He moved down the sidewalk, searching the store windows and watching the crowd for suspicious behavior.

Some instinct told him to duck into a doorway for a moment. When he stepped out, he looked down the walk and saw the girl, her back to him, apparently emerged from a shop where she'd been hiding and waiting for him to pass by. She was still setting a faster-than-average pace through the crowd, which was an expert technique for spotting a tail, but she wasn't looking back; Michael hoped she was just in a hurry to meet with Hector Morales, the boy she'd run to Miami with.

She abruptly turned into a gap between buildings, an alley. Pushing down his unease – strange alleys were textbook sites for ambushes – he slowed as he reached the alley's mouth and took a glance. The girl was still visible, walking briskly down the Dumpster-lined way.

The alley intersected another in a T junction. The girl hurried to the end and took a sharp right. Michael followed after as quickly as stealth would allow. He'd turned the corner and taken four steps down it before he saw the ten-foot chain-link fence stretching across the alley ten yards down, and the girl looking right at him from the other side. Waiting.

A large hand dropped heavily on Michael's shoulder and pulled, forcing him around. He spun and put a forearm into his opponent's wrist at the same time, knocking it off his shoulder. He was face-to-face before details registered: six-three at least, with massive arms and shoulders. Latino, young, and angry. Michael gripped the man's wrist with one hand and his knuckles with the other, intending to pronate the hand – bend the palm towards the forearm – and gain quick control of him through some harmless pain, and thus avoid a fight.

The wrist didn't budge; he might as well have been trying to bend a crowbar. The man drove the heel of his other hand into the center of Michael's chest, a battering-ram blow that took him off his feet and left him gasping with on his elbows on the pavement. He scrambled backwards on hands and heels towards the fence, trying to catch his breath and get enough space between them to bring his gun out as a peacemaker.

The man followed with a heavy tread, hands curled at his sides, teeth bared. "Somebody send you, cabron? Or maybe you just like following girls down alleys, eh?" He closed without waiting for an answer.

Michael wasn't ready to hurt this guy, who seemed to be a friend of Hector and Jocelyn's, and wasn't sure he could subdue him otherwise. Actually, he wasn't sure he could subdue him by hurting him, either. He found his feet and made for the chain-link fence behind him. Hoping a guy this big wasn't a good climber, Michael swarmed up the fence and dropped to the other side. The girl was ten feet away. Michael held up a hand to halt her. "Wait."

The big Latino hadn't even tried to climb the fence. He was standing on the other side, glaring at him, his face nearly pressed to the fence and the fingers of both hands twined in the mesh. Something about his face looked familiar, but Michael didn't have time to puzzle it out. He pulled out his gun, but kept it pointed at the ground. "I just want to talk to her. I'm -"

The man parted the mesh like a curtain and reached through, batting the gun out of Michael's hand. Then steel-hard fingers wrapped around Michael's neck, and he felt himself lifted off his feet and his back slammed into the wall.

He couldn't breathe. Worse, his carotids were thudding against the man's fingers, meaning the blood to his brain was cut off. Michael grasped the thick wrist with both hands, trying to lift himself up a bit and reduce the pressure. He kicked out, trying for a kneecap, but the young ogre was almost straight-arming him, and he couldn't reach one. He swung higher and connected. It felt like kicking a wall. The man grunted and muttered a curse, but the hand under Michael's jaw barely wobbled. His vision darkened.

"Hector!" A girl's voice, almost drowned by the waterfall noise in his ears. "Hector, _don't_!"

"Cabron pulled a gun, Joss."

"He didn't point it. He was just trying to stop you. He said he wanted to talk." A moment later, "Come _on_, Hector."

Michael felt the bricks against his back scrape upward, and then pavement under his feet, faintly. He wasn't sure his legs would support him, and they didn't; his knees buckled and he fell on his hip and elbow, coughing, while his skull filled with needles.

"Talk," Hector said. "Five words. I don't like, you're done."

"Jeez," the girl said. "Takin the macho muchacho bit a little far, arentcha?"

Michael coughed and wheezed a little extra, trying to buy time.

"Well?" Hector stood over him, ready to reach down.

"Lynch sent me," he rasped. He rubbed his throat, trying to think of two more words. "His number."

The change that came over the two of them was immediate, strange, and reassuring. Hector almost seemed to shrink. The girl reached for Michael, but a warning gesture from Hector stopped her. The boy said, "What does he look like?"

Michael sat up, leaning against a debris pile. "About six feet, six-two. Athletic. Late middle age. Brown hair." He coughed again. "Scars on his face, no left eye."

"Okay, you've seen his picture. Describe his voice."

"Deep, kind of raspy. Doesn't do small talk. But if you can get him talking, he starts to sound like a college professor."

Jocelyn grinned, then sobered. Hector looked troubled. He went down on one knee to bring his face closer to Michael's. "Why did he send you? Who are you?"

"Private investigator. Corteza wouldn't tell where he hid you. He was afraid it was a trick."

"You said you have his number?"

He nodded. It made his neck creak, but it hurt less than talking.

They both looked at Michael as if he was about to perform a magic trick. _They trust him like children._

"First," Michael said, rubbing his throat, "prove you're who he's looking for. Where did you meet?"

"In the corridor outside my cell," the boy said. "After Kat blew the door down."

Michael stopped rubbing his throat. _Think about it later._ "No, I mean, where was it?"

Jocelyn spoke up. "The research lab where they had us. Michigan or Minnesota, somewhere near the border. We never knew, exactly."

He nodded, as if he'd been expecting the answer. "Okay. Let me get it out of my pocket. You have a phone?"

They shook their heads. "They can track a phone."

"They can't track his." He handed the card and his phone to the girl. "And they don't know about mine. Just be roundabout when you talk about certain things, and don't mention last names."

She nodded and started punching numbers. Michael said to Hector, "How did you set me up?"

"Ramona spotted you behind them from the bus. Joss borrowed another passenger's phone and called me at work."

He nodded. "Good work. Good place for an ambush, too." That bit with the fence was especially clever, he thought. Whenever Michael encamped in one spot for an extended stay, he prepared disguised entrances and exits for emergencies. Taking one wire out of the fence fabric so it could easily be pulled aside was a clever move, he thought. These kids were smart. "I didn't recognize you. You've grown."

The boy's face blanked, and Michael knew he was hiding something: keeping a secret of Lynch's, he supposed. "Yeah. Been working out a lot."

"Hello?" Jocelyn's face lit up. "Long time no see, Man in Black. Yeah, your guy found us."

Michael gestured for the phone.

"He wants to talk to you." Jocelyn handed it over.

Michael coughed again. "Jack."

"_Good work, Michael. Don't trim your bill._"

"I won't. I went through a lot to find them. But I'm not ready to hand them over yet. I want to set up the meet."

"_Why?_"

"Because now they're my clients too. I want to make sure everybody's getting what they expect." _And everything they deserve._

18


	9. Getting Away From It All

"You were right." Curtis let his eyes travel over the flower-strewn sitting room of the hotel suite. "He went fancy."

A dozen agents moved cautiously throughout the rooms, examining everything, latex gloves on their hands. Two agents stood side-by-side with weapons trained on the closed outer door, their attention never wavering. One held a large pistol in an isosceles stance; the other, standing a little forward, pointed a device resembling a thick-barreled retractable pen in an odd one-handed grip close to his shoulder.

Ferris picked up a big white flower in its own stand, sniffed it, and set it back down. "When did they leave?"

"Keycard was last used around noon. The door's only been unlocked from outside six times since he registered, once by room service to deliver the flowers. No meals ordered, no housekeeping service. But the bed's still made."

"Let's see the registration data again." She took Curtis's PDA from his hand and stared at the screen. The face of a middle-aged balding man stared back. "Bradley Carson, of Devers, Montana. But the clerk's description matched Lynch to ten points, and the lobby cameras concur. He signed the paperwork 'John Lynch' and presented ID in his own freaking name, yet _this_ is what the computer query turns up. Is this guy real?"

"He checks out in any direction we look. Employment history, tax records, residency data, educational history, a complete record. The only thing we can't produce, anywhere we look, is someone who's ever talked to him."

Ferris huffed and shook her head. "Someday, we're going to figure out how he does this. When that happens, we'll drop the hammer on him before he knows we're on to him."

Curtis kept silent.

An agent came through the door from the bedroom, a wadded black shirt in his fist. "Clothes for a man Lynch's size," he said, then held up an almost child-sized blouse. "And for a petite female. Sorry, Boss. I know you were hoping for the Queen of Hearts." Caitlin Fairchild, Queen of Hearts on the team's card decks, was well over six feet tall and built to Barbie-doll specs. "He must be with Spaulding or Devereaux."

Ferris glanced at the girl's shirt: pale blue, long-sleeved, with cream-colored embroidery at cuffs and neck. "Not Spaulding. She wouldn't be caught dead in that." She added softly, "Damn it."

"They're all dangerous," Curtis said softly. "Does it matter which one we nail first?"

"She seduced one of my best agents," she said. "Broke the bed with him, and murdered him like a rat just twelve hours later. It matters to me." Ferris lifted her wrist mike. "Grissom, Anderson, Terlew," she said, addressing the men watching the building from outside. "Subjects are Ace of Spades and Queen of Diamonds. If anyone remotely matching their description enters or leaves, shout out." 'Shout out' was in instruction to send word on the general frequency, rather than the command one; she wasn't about to let her people be taken by surprise by _those_ two over a delay from communications protocol. She swept the room with her eyes. "Anything here they're sure to come back for? Anything that points to where they are now?"

"No and no," the man said.

"Then button this place up and wire it. Have Watts and Cummins stake out the entrance and lobby. Meanwhile, I want video feeds from every camera they might have passed in front of – hotel security, traffic- and parking-lot cams, everything. Let's find out what they're driving, where they've been and where they're going."

-0-

The location for Michael's second meeting with Lynch was very like his first: an open-air restaurant with good views on three sides. This time, however, the time and place had been Michael's choice. He arrived early with Hector and Jocelyn and seated them along the long side of a six-place table with their backs to the bar, where they could see someone approaching from any direction. He took a seat at the end.

As he sipped his juice drink, Hector said, "How's the throat?"

"Recovering." Michael sipped water with lemon. "You've got quite an exercise program, Hector. Three years isn't much time to pack on that kind of muscle." He watched Jocelyn carefully from behind his tinted shades without seeming to, and saw a troubled look pass across her usually sunny face.

The boy nodded into his drink. "The guys at the gym say the same thing. They ask me what I'm taking. I tell em puberty struck hard."

"How do you know Mr. Lynch, Mike?" Jocelyn said, changing the subject artlessly.

"Mostly by reputation." Michael took another sip as he added, "He keeps a few secrets from me, too. He seems to think knowing too much would be bad for my health." He watched her hands rather than her face, and saw them stir restlessly. "Would you say that's a fair assessment?"

"Man," Hector said, "you got no idea. If you find out too much, you'll just disappear."

"Like you did?"

"No, we-" The boy squinted at him. "You're sneaky."

"Goes with the job."

"We already told you too much, didn't we? In the alley."

"You only confirmed Kat's story," Michael lied.

Jocelyn's eyes widened. "You talked to Caitlin?"

Michael filed the name away for further investigation. "Not me. One of my associates. Roxy, too, but not for very long. That girl loves her music." It was the old interrogator's game: try to seem as if you knew more than you did, to encourage your subjects to tell more than they realized. "They're certainly close to Jack and Anna, aren't they?"

She frowned. "Anna?"

"Jack's girlfriend. The little blonde."

"Oh. Never met her. She wasn't with him when he came for us." She made a little face. "A girlfriend. Wow."

Michael nodded. "They must have met her when he brought them home, to the place in California."

Hector's brows gathered. "You sure know a lot for a guy who's not supposed to know anything."

"I get contacted for jobs by some pretty shady people. I like to know who I'm working for. And, kids, I understand you feel like you owe him, but I have a feeling you don't know him very well at all."

Hector sat back, making the overloaded chair creak, and studied him. "Some people, you don't need their life story to know what they're all about." He looked off to the right. "Hey."

Michael followed his gaze and saw Lynch and Anna coming up from a few steps away. Michael noted that the old spook had traded in his sunglasses for a cream-colored eyepatch that matched his jacket. Hector started to stand, but Lynch waved him back down with a palm towards the floor. Michael stood anyway, smiled at Anna, and crossed the length of the table to pull out a chair for her at its opposite end, facing his seat. "Place of honor. Great job, Sam tells me."

She gave Lynch a glance and sat, allowing Michael to push the chair in. Michael returned to his seat.

Lynch stood at the only remaining chair, at the long side opposite the kids, but didn't sit. "Where's the rest of your crew, Michael?"

"On another assignment. We weren't exactly between jobs when you hired us, and our earlier client's getting impatient."

"My apologies. If my pushing my way to the front of the line caused them any harm, I'll recompense, if it's something money will fix."

Michael leaned back. "Forget it, Jack." He nodded towards the little blonde. "Jocelyn, Hector, this is Anna."

"_You're_ the girlfriend?" Joss grinned. "_Not_ what I expected."

Anna ducked her head and smiled. Lynch cleared his throat and fussed with the hang of his jacket, then sat. "Anna's part of our group. You can trust her with anything you'd tell me." Lynch's eye fastened on them, waiting for them to get it. Hector flicked a glance at Michael to show he understood: Michael hadn't been included in that reassurance for a reason. Lynch went on, "I'm glad to see you. You're looking well."

"We're doing well," Jocelyn said. "Mr. Corteza's been like a favorite uncle. We did everything you both told us." Jocelyn leaned forward. "I think we can trust Mike, Mr. L."

Lynch looked very deliberately at Michael. "I'm sure you're right. But he doesn't need to share our troubles. Michael, thank you. I'll have someone contact you for payment arrangements. But now, I have some issues to discuss with these young people in private, so - "

A small red dot appeared on each of the kids' foreheads.

"DOWN!" Lynch flipped up the table one-handed, flinging glassware and condiments into the air and throwing up a barrier in front of Joss and Hector. A gun appeared in his hand as he turned, eye searching. The red sighting dots lingered on the underside of the table for a moment. One winked out, but the other moved to Lynch's chest. He took a step in the direction of its source before it went out as well. Then Lynch glanced at Michael and Anna, who hadn't left their chairs; Michael was sipping from his glass. He stuck the gun back under his coat at the small of his back. "Sam and Fiona?"

Hector's head appeared above the table. Michael, instead of answering, said, "We should go now."

The restaurant was dead silent, the frozen patrons staring at Michael's group. Anna stood, smiling. "Sorry," she said, addressing the area at large. "Just a practical joke that got out of hand." As the other diners pointedly shifted their attention, she beckoned to a frightened waiter, a fan of twenties in her other hand. "Service and damages, and a little something for the staff."

They headed for the parking lot together, walking briskly, Anna taking two steps to the others' one to keep up. Lynch said, "That was dangerous, Mike. I hope you got what you wanted from it."

"When you met me, you said I understood need-to-know. I needed to know." Michael turned to Anna. "How did _you_ know?"

She showed dimples. "I bet you don't play poker with your mom often. She'd clean you out."

They reached the cars: Michael's Charger and a silver Cadillac Escalade. Hector and Jocelyn paused between the two vehicles. "Hector," Anna said, "ride in front with Jack. I'll sit behind you, and you can run the seat all the way back."

The big Latino boy frowned. "You sure?"

"I'm sure. Caitlin has the same problem."

"Oh. Yeah." He moved to the other side of the car.

Lynch huffed. "All the private dicks I could have hired down here, and I have to pick one with a conscience. It must make clients hard to find sometimes. Whatever you were thinking of charging me, double it."

Michael drew close. "As to that. What would you say to a trade?"

Lynch paused with a hand on the driver's door handle. "What sort of trade?"

"My services in return for getting the FBI and Homeland Security off my back. I'd like to be able to travel outside the city limits without risking arrest."

The scarred eyebrow lifted. "And you think I can arrange that?"

"Come on. You travel all over the world. You must be able to spoof the no-fly lists, at least."

"No-fly lists don't mean much when you own a Gulfstream."

Michael paused. "I see." He went on, "Must have been quite a severance package."

"Better than yours, certainly. But your former employers aren't hunting you with blood in their eyes, either."

Anna touched three fingers from her lips to Michael's forehead. "Say bye to everyone for me. Tell Fi if I'm ever in town again, I'd like to meet her for a drink." She opened the rear driver door and scooted across, leaving the door open for Jocelyn.

Only Mike and Lynch still stood outside the vehicles. Lynch closed the rear driver door behind the girls, giving the two spies a bit of privacy. Lynch said, "I do have a counteroffer to make you."

-0-

On the roof of the parking garage overlooking the restaurant, Sam began breaking down his rifle. He hadn't installed the barrel, so removing the scope and laser sight and stock was about all there was to it. "Did you see that? She didn't even blink. She must've figured it out."

Fiona leaned over her rifle, still resting on the parapet, and continued to look out over the edge at the scene with bare eyes. "I'm getting very tired of hearing about your jailbait girlfriend, Sam."

"Hey, I just said she knows her stuff, and we worked good together."

"Four times. The way you go on, one might think you're ready to leave Janelle."

Sam placed the rifle components in their padded case and snapped it shut. "Just professional admiration, that's all. You should have seen her shaking up Corteza."

"Sam," she said in the singsong voice of a woman dangerously near the end of her patience, "you're doing it again."

Sam bent to hide a smile. "Easy to get along with, too."

Fi's weapon _clack_ed as she drew back the bolt. Sam suddenly was aware that she'd fully assembled her rifle for the op, and wondered if she'd put a round in the breech. He had his answer when she removed the bullet and began disassembling her weapon. "Madeline's attitude towards her is positively saccharine. It must be an age thing."

"You were loaded?"

"Sam," she said patiently, "what if we'd been wrong about him? Best to keep our options open."

Sam's phone buzzed, signaling an incoming text. He glanced at the number, and his eyes widened in horror. "Oh, no, no, _no_."

"What is it?"

"Janelle's _birthday_. A weekend at Sanibel. We planned it weeks ago. I was supposed to pick her up an hour ago." He read the longish message, his face smoothing to a blank mask. Finally, he pocketed the phone. "Well. That's that. When we're done here, can we swing by her place and pick up my things from the curb?"

-0-

Once both vehicles were on the road, Jocelyn opened the conversation. "I take it they're on to us?"

"Not exactly, but they're very near." The scarred man swung onto a busy four-lane. "In fact, I'm sure our coming here brought them to your door sooner. But I had to make sure I got here first." He glanced across at Hector. "Easy enough to see _you_ manifested."

Hector nodded. "When my clothes started getting tight, I remembered Kat, how she grew twice her size in a month and a half. I started working out like crazy, so the change wouldn't be so suspicious."

Lynch flipped down the visor. A mirror was mounted on its upper surface; he adjusted it until he was looking into Jocelyn's eyes. "I guess that means you're the one who's been buying lottery tickets." The girl's widening eyes were all the answer he waited for before going on. "I'm sure you thought you were being cautious. You never won any really big jackpots, and you spread your purchases all over town. But it made a statistical blip, just the same. Your special talent has something to do with luck?"

"Sort of," Jocelyn said, shrugging uncomfortably. "It's more like… I can see branching possibilities and sometimes choose among them. I play baseball, I never strike out – never even swing at one. Bowling, every game's a three hundred. Guessing games are a yawn."

"You should see her do gymnastics," Hector said proudly. "She was always good, but now… she hits every one of her marks, never makes a mistake. Put her in the Olympics, she'll run _away_ with the gold."

"And I'd be back in my cell before my next meal, prolly." She gave a heavy sigh. "Okay, I screwed up. For what it's worth, I didn't keep much of the money. People around here are just hurting so bad, and there's so many places looking for donations. How did you spot it before _they_ did?"

Lynch turned onto another road that paralleled the western shore of Biscayne Bay, but only occasional glimpses of the water were visible between the high-rises and upscale shopping venues. "One of the reasons I scattered you kids all over the country was to make anomalies like this harder to spot. IO has powerful tools, but they still can't look closely everywhere; it's too easy to gather more data than you can assimilate that way. I had the advantage of knowing exactly where to look."

She nodded. "What now, move again?"

"I'm afraid so."

"How soon?"

Lynch paused. "When you arrived here, you had twenty grand in cash, Corteza's phone number, a stolen car, and the clothes on your backs. Is there anything in your apartment you can't leave without?"

Joss's eyes grew round. "You mean, we're already gone?"

The scarred man nodded. "I know we're ahead of them, but I don't know by how much. They might not have hit town yet, or they might be stepping on our heels."

Hector reached a huge arm back between the seats. "Everything I need, I got with me." Joss nodded and grasped his fingers. "Where are we going?"

"Where are you kids from?"

"Chicago," Hector said, looking out at the changing scenery; the hotels or apartment buildings, whichever they had been, had faded away, and big sheds had begun to appear among the stores and restaurants.

"South Dakota." Jocelyn shrugged. "You wouldn't recognize the name of the town."

"Well," the scarred man said, "I hope your stay here has given you both a taste for hot weather."

-0-

The restaurant staff was sweeping up the last of the broken glass when Ferris and her team arrived. She'd left most of her people outside, entering with Curtis and two others from her vehicle. While they scanned the patrons, she questioned the staff and learned that their quarry had been there less than fifteen minutes before, and of the event that had prompted his departure. None of them had seen the Crazies from Table Six after they'd passed out the doors. Rather than attract attention by questioning the patrons, she examined the recent visual record from the parking lot's security cams. Six minutes later, she was walking out the door, speaking into her wrist mike. "Team. Subjects are Ace of Spades, Queen of Diamonds, Nine of Spades, and Eight of Hearts, in a silver '07 Escalade."

"Three of them went down the street since you said it," Curtis muttered. "This burg's infested with pricey rides."

She gave him a dark glance and added the plate number. "Last seen headed south on U.S. One. Be advised, Nine of Spades is a probable FDM, Eight of Hearts' talent unknown." She strode briskly across the asphalt to the parked Suburban. "Curtis. Let Daniel and Cal take the wheel and shotgun. I want you to chase that Caddy down. It's equipped with OnStar, so it's got a GPS. If he's disabled it, track him down via traffic cams. If you get realtime feed, download to my PDA."

"What about the guy in the Charger?" Curtis asked. "He's the one who brought the kids. The car's registered to a Madeline Westen, local address."

"We'll get to him later." She reached for her own door handle, and Curtis quickly rounded the back of the big vehicle. "After we've got Lynch and the others. Maybe he knows where to find some more of them." She called up Madeline Westen's stats and sent them to the team's dedicated IT unit in Boulder.

"Miami International's northwest of here, not south." Curtis settled into the rear seat next to his boss as the other two agents got in the front, and everyone shut their doors with a tattoo of _thunks_.

Ferris addressed the man seated in front of her. "Alert every private field, corporate jet park, and helipad along his path. No one remotely answering his description is to get on an aircraft."

"APB?" He asked dubiously.

"Of course not. Just stay ahead of him by phone. Give whoever's in charge some DHS or FAA credentials and lean on them. Keep it quiet."

As the vehicle fired up and rolled to the street, her PDA chimed. Her display now showed a directory of the contents of Mrs. Westen's cellphone chip: call history, address book, messages sent and received – including deleted ones – and a very long list of GPS coordinates sorted by date and time, a list of the phone's locations and movements since first activation two years before.

A glance at the GPS file told Ferris that Madeline Westen was a homebody, seldom traveling more than a few miles from her address. She closed it and opened the call log. She sorted the numbers by frequency and began matching them to numbers in the address book. Most of the entries were first-name-only, but only three in the top ten were men. Madeline Westen was sixty-one years old. "Curtis. Has the Westen woman got any kids?"

"Two sons. I thought you were going to hold off on that."

"Just laying the groundwork while I've got a couple minutes to kill. You got names?"

"Hang on." He called up another screen. "Michael and Nathan. Nathan lives out-of-state. Hm. No address for Michael."

"No problem." She smiled and returned to the call log. She called up GPS address data on the number corresponding to 'Michael' in Madeline's address book. There weren't many – the phone was a prepay, and appeared to have been activated no more than three weeks before – but about half the phone's locations when calling or receiving a call from the Westen woman clustered within a twenty-meter circle only a couple of miles from her house. "I've got it." The car had been rolling for four minutes. She sent another short text to Boulder, a data request on Michael Westen.

As they rolled down the street and the other three Suburbans formed up in a line behind them, Ferris called up another local map, this time on the eight-inch screen built into the back of the seat in front of her. "It doesn't look like he could have reached an airfield yet. How's the cam chase coming?"

Curtis was busy on his PDA. "Closing fast. He's cruising down Brickell, along the shore. There's nothing there but boats and a lot of water." He stopped. "Whups. Lost him. Hang on … he's turned off, into a marina, maybe ten minutes ago."

Ferris leaned over, intent on the image on Curtis's PDA. "He's taking a boat? He'd never do that if he knew how close we are." She nodded. "He's a sitting duck. Once we identify the boat, we can have people waiting for him anywhere he makes landfall. If he makes for the open sea, we'll alert the Coast Guard and take him on the open water before he can reach international waters. Ditto if he's meeting an ocean-going ship offshore."

"You're not worried about letting the Coasties mix it up with this bunch?"

"Curtis, Lynch has never killed a police officer of any kind. Neither has any of his crew, even the psychotic little blonde. Our people, yes. Not lawmen. I think they'll surrender rather than take out a cutter full of maritime cops, or even a chopper crewed by Search and Rescue types."

"We've finally got him where we want him, then."

The woman's face stiffened. "Just like we did at Charlotte. And Chula Vista."

"Always the pessimist. Like you said, he's got nowhere to run this time."

Ferris's phone chimed. She examined the number, which she didn't recognize. She connected. "Talk."

"_That guy you want. I'm looking at him right now._"

-0-

"What a beautiful day for a little cruise." Anna stood beside Lynch, who sat at the wheel of the forty-foot cruiser, and looked over the sloped windshield and long closed front ending in a pointed prow. The water ahead sparkled with sunshine. A canvas top stretched over an aluminum frame shaded the cockpit, but the view was open all around. Biscayne Bay, she decided, was a thoroughly domesticated body of water. She saw other pleasure craft all around, headed in every direction, churning the water under their prows to foam. The shore on both sides of the bay was lined with docks and high-rises. She could see two causeways, busy with traffic, connecting the mainland to the barrier islands that formed the bay. "You know, this is my first time on a boat."

Lynch made a small adjustment to their course, pointing the boat northeast. The craft bobbed gently in the faint trace of some other boat's recent wake, then smoothed out. The rumbling of the engines wasn't loud enough to drown out the call of the gulls and other birds overhead. "Sure about that?"

"Not really." The breeze coming over the windshield stirred her short hair. "But it's the first time I remember." She looked back over her shoulder and studied the moving vehicles on the causeway half a mile to the south. "We're not going very fast. About eighteen, twenty?"

"It'll do. I've crossed rivers wider than Biscayne Bay. We'll be in open water soon enough."

"You look very nautical and in command sitting at that wheel."

He scoffed. "I'm driving a motor home with a hull. I could've gotten something smaller and faster, but this one is big enough to provide a little misdirection about our destination."

"Which is?" Jocelyn said from the open lounge behind them.

"We're meeting a friend who'll take us to our next waypoint." He turned and regarded her, sitting on white leather cushions in the circle of Hector's arm. "How you kids doing back there?"

"Great," Jocelyn said. "All the time I lived here, I never saw it like this. _This_ is the Miami you see on TV."

Hector hoisted his soft drink. "I feel like a drug lord. You travel in style, Mr. L."

Lynch scoffed. "As if any self-respecting drug lord would ever set foot aboard this bathtub toy."

The girl looked over the rear deck appreciatively. "Is it yours? We walked right on like you own it. It was gassed up and ready to go."

He nodded. "Picked it up on my way to the meet, to save time. But I don't hold title. I just paid the owner enough to buy a new one in return for the keys and a full tank of gas. No doubt he'll report it stolen."

The girl drilled the back of Lynch's head with her eyes. "That stuff you told Mike about giving us a choice was a bunch of crap. Wasn't it?"

Hector stirred. "Joss -"

"Just asking."

Lynch didn't turn around. "If you really want, I can drop you off and you can surrender to them. Did I guess wrong what choice you'd make?"

The girl settled back into the cushions and her boyfriend. "No way. Just wanted to see what you'd say."

"We're gonna need new IDs," Hector said.

"No problem," Lynch told them. "The new ones will be even better. You'll be able to use your own names again, and no data search will ever find you."

"_Cool._"

Anna looked off to their left, northward, at an island so large it almost spanned the bay. Its ruler-straight bank indicated it was one of many islands here created, or at least shaped, by channel dredging. It was heavily developed, but with industrial structures rather than residential ones, including several big cranes on steel stilts, and a parking and storage area so vast one might think the island was made of concrete – a shipyard or port. Rising over the tops of the buildings, presumably on the other side of the island, she saw the hotel-like superstructures of a line of cruise ships pointed towards the open sea.

He followed her gaze. "Port of Miami. It has its own channel, three hundred yards wide and straight as a runway leading out to sea." He turned the boat eastwards, towards the line of islands that sheltered the coast and formed the bay. "We're not taking it. There's a smaller and less-traveled opening between Fisher Island and Virginia Key. That's our route."

Anna's phone chimed. She glanced at the number before she connected. "Hello, Sam."

"_I tried calling your boss, but he's not answering his phone._"

"And I was hoping you wanted to talk to me, lover boy." Anna glanced at Lynch, who seemed a little too oblivious to the conversation. "I'm going to miss you."

"_Uh, same here. Do you know where he is?_"

"Right beside me. But he's not the jealous type." She passed over the phone. "Are you?"

"Hello, Sam." He listened for a minute. "Fine. It's settled then. I know it's not exactly what Michael wanted, but I hope he feels he wasn't cheated." He listened a little longer, glancing at Anna. "Of course. In fact, I'll make arrangements for five, in case Mike's mother changes her mind. I'll call later with the details. Be ready to go by tomorrow night." He disconnected and sighed.

Anna said, "I never question your decisions, you know that. But I wonder why you didn't offer Michael one of your bulletproof IDs."

"I didn't dare." Lynch's hand tightened on the wheel as the waterway narrowed and the boat approached a gap between two islands. "Our freedom of movement depends on keeping IO in the dark about our full capabilities. If they lay hands on one of our cell phones or IDs, they'll be able to figure out how we're spoofing their surveillance, and how thoroughly." He gave her a hard look. "And, maybe, where we got the tech. We can't afford that."

"But you trust the kids with it. Why not him?"

"Because he's not going to use it to lie low and avoid notice, now, is he? He'll use it to go places he's not welcome, to slip past the pickets put up to stop him and stir things up. Getting noticed is part of his plan, and noticed he'll be." He glanced back at the two teenagers. "I'm not cold to his troubles. But I can't afford to give him that kind of help."

She nodded. "Jack, where's your phone? Sam said he couldn't reach you on it."

"No one can." The two islands flanking their route made for a sharp contrast. The one on the right looked mostly wild and brushy and uninhabited, but the shore of the one on the left was walled with nearly identical high-rises, surrounded by manicured grass and landscaping and swimming pools: a resort of some kind. "All our numbers are going to change by the time we get back home. I'll give you the list. Call the kids and let them know, will you?"

They motored through the gap. Only three boats shared the channel with them, though there were many at the luxurious dockage on the island to the north, and at a rather more institutional one jutting from an inlet leading into the island to the south. As the passage widened and the two islands were nearly behind them, they passed by a yacht basin on the left with half a dozen huge craft moored behind a seawall.

"Yikes," Hector said. "Drug lords?"

"Possibly." Lynch kept his eyes forward as the Atlantic spread out and stretched away in front of them. "Tort lawyers, more likely."

"That big one, with three decks above the rail. How long is it? It looks like a little cruise ship."

Anna looked. "Two hundred feet, give or take." She frowned. "Jack."

"Eh?" He followed her gaze. The craft in question had a sundeck on the third story, high above the water, just aft of the lazily turning radar. A man stood there at the rail, glass in hand, watching them. "Hmph. It looks like one of my contacts here, a gunrunner named Humboldt. He's a golfer, and, as I recall, Fisher Island has a nice little nine-holer." He gave a little wave, and, after a pause, the man slowly raised his glass.

"No." Anna's gaze was as intent as ever, studying the ship now at closest approach, less than a hundred yards away. "Not him. The man on the main deck."

Lynch's attention shifted down to the main deck, and a man standing at the rail watching them, a cell phone to his ear. Anna went on, "He saw us and punched in the number from a business card he fished out of his pocket."

"It's okay, not a problem." But he advanced the throttles to their stops, and the engines shouted as the craft picked up speed, heading into the open sea.

-0-

Curtis got off the phone as the convoy rolled down Brickell past the marina the Escalade had entered. "The Coast Guard has a fast launch that should be able to intercept them before they reach international waters, and they're warming up one of their drug-interception choppers right now, a Dolphin. They should be in custody in thirty minutes, tops."

"Good," Ferris said, leaning back in the seat cushion. She indicated a road sign. "I want two of our people aboard that launch in Coast Guard uniform. I want all of them tranked and collared before we take them off their boat."

"Going to call the Director?"

"Bird in hand, Curtis."

-0-

"Yes, Roxanne," Anna said indulgently into the phone, raising her voice to be heard over the cruiser's laboring engines, "I agree there may not be another girl your age in the entire world with a midnight curfew. It's only one of many ways you're unique, sweetie, and I treasure every one of them. You know the rule is Jack's, and it's not going to change. It's been this way since you moved in. Quit giving Caitlin a hard time about it. Anything else?" She listened for a moment and smiled. "Eddie won't die if he runs out of cupcakes. We'll be home in a couple days, I think. Give our love to everyone. No, don't hang up. Do you remember Jocelyn Davis?" She looked at the girl, who sat waiting and expectant. "I'm looking right at her. Hector Morales, too. Would you like to-" She smiled and tossed the phone to the girl, who caught it effortlessly.

Lynch glanced back at the smiling girl as she chatted on the phone, with Hector bending close to listen. "Good idea. Give the two of them some reassurance from their peers."

Anna hooked an arm in his. "And keep our little dynamo from badgering you. I'm sure you wouldn't bend on the curfew thing, but that wouldn't stop her from trying. And I know how hard it is for you to say 'no' to her."

He smiled slightly. "As if you don't spoil her just as much." The boat's prow rose and fell, sending spray over the deck, and he turned back to his piloting. "You told her we'd be back in a couple days. What happened to our little vacation?"

"My choice, you said. We have a very nice bed at home. And I can bake and clean between times, while you rest up."

He scoffed and slipped his arm out of hers, then wound it around her waist. He pulled her close, and she rested a hand on the back of his neck. She looked back. The top floors of Miami's tallest skyscrapers were still visible above the horizon, but the land was gone. They were surrounded by the Atlantic.

Jocelyn said, "How much farther? I hope this guy you're meeting has a bigger boat. And when did you set this up? Before we came to the meet?"

"No," Lynch said. "I didn't know how long the meet would take, and I didn't want him hanging around out here waiting for us. I made a phone call while I was warming up the engines and Hector was casting off."

Anna, still looking back, tugged at his sleeve. "Jack. There's a boat coming after us. From the port, I think. Two miles away, but closing."

The two youngsters tensed and looked behind them, but their pursuers were too distant to see. Lynch turned north, paralleling the unseen shore on their left. "Can you make out any details?"

"I think it's in Coast Guard colors."

"Hmph." He looked at his watch. "If that's all they've got-"

Anna whipped her head around. "I hear an aircraft ahead, heading right for us."

Lynch throttled the engines back to an idle. The boat bobbed in the swell. Water chuckled against the hull. A faint deep hum began to fill the silence.

Hector and Jocelyn rose from their seats and drew close. Hector said quietly, "This is it, huh?" Jocelyn shivered and pressed into his side.

Lynch nodded. "Think so."

Anna said, peering ahead, "It's an airplane."

Lynch said, "A Grumman Albatross, to be precise. Fifty years old, and lovingly cared for."

An ungainly-looking aircraft approached low, seeming to skim the waves. It looked rather like a Fifties-era cabin cruiser hanging from a pair of wings. Big radial engines, mounted close together, filled the air with a throbbing growl. It dropped into the water with a triple splash, its boat-shaped fuselage and wing outriggers riding the waves as it slowed and taxied towards them. Blue and white lettering on its side said, 'Cook's Island Airline'. The engines chattered, and the propellers creaked to a stop. A small door opened towards the rear, and an elderly man in coveralls shouted through it. "Come alongside, quick."

Lynch applied a touch of power to the boat's props. "Everybody, climb up on the foredeck. Get on the plane." He brought the boat alongside the plane's raised tail with the side of the foredeck carefully up lined up with the door. Jocelyn leaped the four-foot gap with the grace of a gazelle. Hector made the hatch as well, with a leap that made both the boat and the aircraft bob. Anna stood on the deck opposite the door, looking back at Lynch, waiting.

"I'm coming," he said. "What are you waiting for?"

"Then come. Age before beauty."

As soon as the power to the engines was cut, the two vessels began to drift apart. Lynch scrambled over the windshield and rushed across the deck towards the plane's door. He leaped, and just caught the lower lip of the doorway. He scrambled aboard with his pants wet to the knees.

"Step back." Anna stood on the boat's deck looking across a dozen feet of water to the plane's door. The two craft rose and fell unevenly in the swell, and the plane rocked side-to-side as well, making gauging the jump a further challenge. She backed up, sprinted across the width of the deck, and leaped with the force of a catapult, sending the bow reeling away, and arcing above the plane on her way to her target. The spectators in the doorway barely had time to draw back before she tumbled through, fetching up against the opposite wall. "Whew."

"I'll be amazed about that later," the pilot said. "Jack, you come forward. Kids, buckle in." He moved to the pilot's compartment. "We're gonna have company real soon here."

Hector eyed the dent in the cabin wall opposite the doorway as he squeezed into a seat and searched for a belt. "So, you're one of us, huh?"

Anna smiled as she selected her own seat.

Jocelyn settled in next to her boy. "He saved you too?"

Anna nodded, watching Lynch step into the flight deck and turn to the right-hand seat. "He did."

"And now you're his trusty sidekick. And his girlfriend."

"I'm anything he wants me to be."

Jocelyn eyed the scarred-up man three times her age buckling into the copilot's seat. "That's a lotta gratitude."

The little blonde smiled. "You think so? Then I stated myself poorly." She gazed on the man in the right-hand seat with shiny eyes. "I'm everything to him that he'll let me be."

The girl nodded, understanding, and leaned against her man.

In the flight compartment, the plane's owner said, "Good to see you again, Jack. It's been, what, fifteen years? The call yesterday was a real pleasant surprise."

"And then I call you the next day for a huge favor." Lynch donned a headset. "You know this will cost you your certification, Cookie."

The man flipped a few switches, and the engines chattered to roaring life. "They been gonna put me outta business for years, Jack. They just needed an excuse. Might as well give em a good one, eh?"

"You might be throwing away your license, too."

The aircraft rose and dipped like a rocking horse as it gathered speed. "You threw away your commission to nail the sumbitch was giving our 'secret' landing sites to the VC. You probably saved my life." The plane's travel became straighter as the wings bit air, but the ride grew hard and jostling as it plowed over the waves. "Then, a few years later, you got me that gig with the Company. The money from that job got my airline started." The ride abruptly smoothed out as the craft became airborne.

"You earned every penny, considering what would've happened to you if we'd gotten caught. And it was your hot piloting saved all our necks at least twice."

Cook smiled out the windshield. "We can keep trying to balance the books all the way to Maine, if you want. Grumpy here has about two thousand miles range with this load. Where to?"

"Fort Lauderdale Exec."

The man grimaced. Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport was just fifteen minutes away. "You sure?"

"I'm sure. I have another plane waiting. I just needed to lead our pursuit somewhere it would be easy to break contact. No offense, Cookie, but the sooner we're out of this flying monument to nostalgia the better."

-0-

"Now, this is what I'd call a perfect vacation." At ease in a lounge chair on the beach facing the water, Sam put his lips to the straw of his drink and noisily pulled up the last swallow. He held up his glass, and a white-jacketed attendant came bustling up. "Would you say?"

"Just about," Fiona said beside him, staring out to sea in her own chair and looking rather less content.

Michael, in the third chair, hid his smile behind his drink. "Sam, where's Janelle?"

"Snorkeling." Sam took a fresh glass from the attendant. "She'll be back in time for dinner, I'm sure."

Fi lifted a knee. "Things all fixed up between you two?"

Sam took a sip, smiling. "_Oh_, yeah. Once she saw that Gulfstream on the pavement with its door open, her heart melted like a sugar cube in a glass of rum."

"Why didn't you go snorkeling with her, then?"

"Because I've already spent more time underwater than most fish," he replied. "Hey. Mikey. Maybe we can rent a boat tomorrow and go fishing."

Without looking at him, Fi reached over and squeezed Michael's thigh, hard.

"I'll take a pass." Michael turned slightly towards his girlfriend. "Fi. When you put Lynch in your sights. You weren't really thinking of shooting him, were you?"

"Not very hard," she said. "I was just trying to make a point."

"That point being?"

"That a man's never so tough and clever he can't be taken down." She shifted again. "But, you know, I'm not so sure I proved it."

"Oh?"

"I was watching his face through the scope, looking for… well, I was hoping for a moment of panic, but I'd have settled for surprise. I've seen a man spotting a sighting dot on his chest react in a lot of ways, everything from disbelief to wet-your-pants. I've never seen a man look peeved before. And I wouldn't believe one could look… menacing. This is going to sound crazy, but he seemed to look me straight in the eye, right through the scope from a hundred yards away, and the expression on his face…. Almost daring me to pull the trigger. As if he was sure the bullet would never touch him. If I'd really been trying to shoot him, I think it might have spoiled my aim. I don't know which side he's on, but I'd rather not work with him again, Michael."

-0-

"_Still think he's the Devil?_" Michael Westen's voice came clearly through the speaker of the PDA sitting on Ferris Mars's desk. All around her, agents were packing up gear. Ferris glanced over the desk at Curtis, seated on the opposite side.

"_I don't know what to think,_" Fiona Glenanne replied. "_I only know what I feel, and my instincts tell me to stay well clear of a man who thinks he's pals with Death._"

"Perceptive girl," Curtis said, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly. "Whose cellphone are we jacking?"

"Presently? The partner with the absent girlfriend," Ferris answered. "According to the phone's GPS, they're at a resort on a private island off the coast of Honduras. Every room is five grand a night." They listened a few minutes more while the three sunbathers discussed dinner plans at a fancy restaurant nearby. Then Ferris shut off the PDA and turned to the screen on her laptop. "Lynch is a monster, but he does pay well."

"Nothing new on the plane?"

Ferris locked down her computer and shut it. "The usual. The boat plane put down at a corporate field west of Fort Lauderdale, where they boarded an executive jet, a late-model Gulfstream."

He nodded. "Which gives them a range of up to seven thousand miles."

"The tail number recorded on the ground maintenance logs doesn't match any aircraft that filed a flight plan in or out of the field, and in fact belongs to a Gulf presently hangared in Chicago for its thousand-hour overhaul. Six similar aircraft they might have been on left within an hour of their arrival, with flight plans ending at six different airports from Heathrow to LAX. We met them all on the ground, of course. None of them had our runaways aboard. But I doubt all six of the planes that landed were the ones that took off from Fort Lauderdale."

"Anything on the backtrack?" In addition to the visual record of their subjects' movements unearthed by the patchwork of camera footage, the Shop's intelligence-gathering unit had provided Ferris's team with Westen & Company's cellphone data. Sam Axe's data dump had been particularly detailed, yielding a record of his contacts and whereabouts years long.

She disconnected the laptop's power cord and wound it up. "As usual, too much to process properly on the fly. Nothing jumped out, so I turned it over to Central. We've already got recordings of all their phone conversations since before Lynch hired them. Every keystroke on their computers, too. This guy Axe is a bulldog for research."

"Did he learn anything?"

Ferris produced a hard metal case and put the laptop in it, zipped it shut, and pushed it to the center of the desk. Curtis pulled it to him, and attached the handle to his wrist with a chain. She said, "About the Shop? Hell, no. He saw through Lynch's cover story, no small feat, but IO's never going to be exposed by somebody who's just curious."

"What about that geek friend of his?"

"He dug for awhile without finding anything, then it looks like he got bored and moved on to something else. Doesn't mean he won't come back to it, though. The way he works is interesting. Looks disorganized as hell, but he gets results. Very intuitive."

"I wonder about his chances, then."

"Zero," Ferris said firmly. "He's doing most of his research on the Web, after all, and we own it." She considered. "Still."

"Thinking of doing something about him, Ferris?"

"Half a dozen possibilities come to mind. Some of them allow him to keep his life and freedom. The simplest would be to recruit him, of course. Or just arrange for a prescription error." She shrugged her head. "I'd say watch him but leave him alone, till he gives us a reason not to. The same for the others."

"You're giving Westen a pass?"

"You heard the phone conversations. Lynch was very careful not to tell him anything important, especially about the Project. We've searched their homes and cars and rental spaces for leads. The phone numbers he had for the Lynch Mob are disconnected already. Westen has nothing."

"He's still a loose end. Why the charity?"

"It's not charity, exactly." Ferris stretched out a leg and put her twined fingers behind her head. "Another group has plans for him, people who've been useful to us in the past. Think of it as professional courtesy." She lifted her eyebrows. "If we change our minds, we'll know where to find him, after all."

25


End file.
